Author: Keilman, M.V.
Paper Title Page
SUPAF07 High-Fidelity Three-Dimensional Simulations of Thermionic Energy Converters 59
 
  • N.M. Cook, J.P. Edelen, C.C. Hall, M.V. Keilman, P. Moeller, R. Nagler
    RadiaSoft LLC, Boulder, Colorado, USA
  • J.-L. Vay
    LBNL, Berkeley, California, USA
 
  Funding: This work is supported the US DOE Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics: 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. We also con­sider self-con­sis­tent ef­fects to model Schot­tky emis­sion near the space-charge limit for ar­rays of shaped emit­ters. The ef­fi­ciency of these de­vices is com­puted by mod­el­ing dis­tinct loss chan­nels, in­clud­ing ki­netic losses, ra­dia­tive losses, and di­elec­tric charg­ing. We demon­strate many of these fea­tures within an open-source, browser-based in­ter­face for run­ning 3D elec­tro­sta­tic sim­u­la­tions with Warp, in­clud­ing de­sign and analy­sis tools, as well as stream­lined sub­mis­sion to HPC cen­ters.
 
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DOI • reference for this paper ※ https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-ICAP2018-SUPAF07  
About • paper received ※ 01 November 2018       paper accepted ※ 19 November 2018       issue date ※ 26 January 2019  
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