Effect of wall thickness of micro-combustor on the performance of micro-thermophotovoltaic power generators

A prototype micro-thermophotovoltaic power generator is described in this work. The system is mainly composed of a micro-cylindrical SiC combustor, a simple nine layer dielectric filter and a GaSb photovoltaic cell array. Three kinds of micro-cylindrical SiC combustors with different wall thickness are fabricated and tested. The volume of the combustion chamber is 0.113 cm3. The performance of the micro-TPV system is measured for all kinds of flow rates and H2/air ratios. When the inner diameter of the micro-combustor is kept as constant, with the decrease of wall thickness of the micro-combustor, both the maximum electrical power output and short-circuit current increase drastically. As the flow rate of hydrogen is 4.20 g/h, and the H2/air ratio is 0.9, the maximum electrical power outputs of the micro-TPV system are 0.92, 0.78 and 0.57 W for the wall thickness of 0.4, 0.6 and 0.8 mm, respectively. The performance of the micro-TPV power generator with a wall thickness of 0.4 mm is the best.