[HBQRP] A different type of 'solar' power..

[Sean Pepin]

TPV systems are neat stuff!

I had a dim memory of a paper put out by our own University of Nebraska 
regarding TPV material, and I actually managed to find it! The UNL 
materials research lab did a joint paper with some folks in Germany on 
III-IV mixed semiconductor materials tinkering around with boron and 
gallium-indium-arsenide.

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/mrsecfacpubs/65/

It's written in the language of high science (which I don't speak well), 
but I thought it was neat that a little bit of the work on TPV has been 
done here locally.

There's a really good synopsis of TPV science on wikipedia that's much 
more readable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic

This technology is still in it's early stages, but if they get the 
efficiency up near ideal numbers (mainly by playing with materials 
science) it'll be amazing. Being able to recover a sizeable percentage 
of 'waste' heat from nearly any process will be amazing.