Among physical vapor deposition techniques thermal evaporation (TE) is the one with the longest standing tradition. However, during the last 30 years of booming semiconductor industry which involves a great deal of thin film technology, deposition techniques like CVD (chemical vapor deposition) or sputtering which often offer unquestionable advantages have been developed to perfection and TE ha...

Wearable thermoelectric generators (TEGs) harvest thermal energy generated by the body to generate useful electricity. The performance of these systems is limited by (1) the small working temperature differential between the body and ambient, (2) the desire to use natural air convection cooling on the cold side of the generator, and (3) the requirement for thin, lightweight systems that are com...

Near-field thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems with carefully tailored emitter-PV properties show large promise for a new temperature range (600 – 1200K) solid state energy conversion, where conventional thermoelectric (TE) devices cannot operate due to high temperatures and far-field TPV schemes suffer from low efficiency and power density. We present a detailed theoretical study of several diffe...

A tool for evaluating thin-film thermal conductivity to submicron spatial resolution has been developed. The micro-instrumentation utilizes the thermoreflectance (TR) technique to characterize thermal conductivity and material uniformity. The instrument consists of a heating element for creating temperature gradients and an Invar bar with in situ temperature monitoring for heat flux measurement...

The effect of the refractive index of the substrate together with the incident polarization on the optimization of sawtooth surface-relief gratings (SRGs) is investigated. The global optimum diffraction efficiencies of the -1st forward-diffracted order of sawtooth SRGs are 63.3% occurring at n2=1.47 for TE polarization and 73.8% occurring at n2=2.88 for TM polarization. Incident TE polarization...

We propose a compact highly-efficient CMOS-compatible polarization splitter and rotator (PSR) with a wide bandwidth covering the whole O-band. It benefits from the different confinement capability of TE and TM modes in bend structure. This bend structure helps shorten the PSR and maintain high efficiency, achieving the bending, polarization splitting, rotating of light beam at the same time. Nu...

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the aim of this paper is to use the concept of the metafrontier function to study the determination of efficiency differentials and technological gap ratio (tgr) on wheat production in khorasan razavi province. in this study, we used the metafrontier function and group frontier based on the concept of stochastic nonparametric envelopment of data analysis (stoned). the data used in this study co...