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Near-Field Nanogap Thermophotovoltaics

Interactive 3D simulator: shrink the vacuum gap between a hot emitter plate and a photovoltaic cell down to nanometres and watch evanescent photon tunneling push the radiative heat flux far past the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody limit, boosting electrical power output.

Energy & Thermodynamics3DAdvanced60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted

Push a hot emitter plate and a photovoltaic cell to within nanometres of each other and the physics of heat transfer changes completely. Far apart, radiative heat flow between them is capped by the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody limit — the same law that governs a campfire warming your face. Inside the nanoscale gap, evanescent electromagnetic modes that would otherwise never reach the far plate instead tunnel across it, and the heat flux can exceed the blackbody limit by orders of magnitude. This simulator renders both plates in 3D with a live particle stream standing in for that photon-tunneling channel, and tracks the real governing quantities — blackbody flux, near-field enhancement factor, and the electrical power a bandgap-matched PV cell actually extracts — as you sweep gap distance, emitter and cell temperature, and quantum efficiency.

⚙ Under the hood

Shrink the vacuum gap between a hot emitter plate and a photovoltaic cell down to nanometres and watch evanescent photon tunneling push the radiative heat flux far past the Stefan-Boltzmann blackbody limit, boosting electrical power output.

nanotechnologythermophotovoltaicsnear-field radiationenergy harvestingheat transfer

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install