Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Deppe, TristanSubject: search.filters.subject.Renewable Energy

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    Nighttime Photovoltaic Cells: Electrical power generation by optically couping with deep space
    (2019) Deppe, Tristan; Munday, Jeremy N; Electrical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Photovoltaics possess significant potential due to the abundance of solar power incident on earth; however, they can only generate electricity during daylight hours. In order to produce electrical power after the sun has set, we consider an alternative photovoltaic concept that uses the earth as a heat source and the night sky as a heat sink, resulting in a “nighttime photovoltaic cell” that employs thermoradiative photovoltaics and radiative cooling to output as much as 10 W/m^2 from ambient radiation. This thesis will discuss the principles of thermoradiative photovoltaics, the theoretical limits of coupling a device with deep space, the potential of advanced radiative cooling techniques to enhance their performance, and a discussion of the practical limits, scalability, and integrability of this nighttime photovoltaic concept.