Author: Hu, Y.
Paper Title Page
THPMP047 Advanced Modeling and Optimization of Thermionic Energy Converters 3552
 
  • J.P. Edelen, N.M. Cook, C.C. Hall, Y. Hu
    RadiaSoft LLC, Boulder, Colorado, USA
  • J.-L. Vay
    LBNL, Berkeley, California, USA
 
  Funding: This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics under Award Number DE-SC0017162
Thermionic energy converters (TEC) are a class of thermoelectric devices, which promise improvements to the efficiency and cost of both small- and large-scale electricity generation. A TEC is comprised of a narrowly-separated thermionic emitter and an anode. Simple structures are often space-charge limited as operating temperatures produce currents exceeding the Child-Langmuir limit. We present results from 3D simulations of these devices using the particle-in-cell code Warp, developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. We demonstrate improvements to the Warp code permitting high fidelity simulations of complex device geometries. These improvements include modeling of non-conformal geometries using mesh refinement and cut-cells with a dielectric solver, in addition to importing geometries directly from standard CAD output. In this paper we showcase some of these new features and demonstrate their use.
 
DOI • reference for this paper ※ https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-IPAC2019-THPMP047  
About • paper received ※ 14 May 2019       paper accepted ※ 22 May 2019       issue date ※ 21 June 2019  
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