Design Of Testing System For Nanomaterials' Thermoelectric, Photovoltaic, Thermophotovoltaic Performance Based On LabVIEW

As the energy and environmental crisis increase, people turn to the development and utilization of new energy sources. With the maturing of nano-materials preparation technology and the low-dimensional continuous development, the study of thermoelectric properties and photoelectric properties of nano-materials has become a hot research. However the thermal photovoltaic performance test equipment of nanomaterials is expensive and complicated to operate, it's not only difficult to promote the use, but also hinder the development of relevant domestic industries. In this background, this paper uses the PCI6221 data acquisition card, programmable power supply, keithley picoammeter and self-made conditioning circuit to build a set of easy-to-build, low cost and high precision measurement of thermophotovoltaic performance test system which is based on the Lab VIEW software.1) Nano-materials' thermal photovoltaic performance testing platform is built with five components: a mixture of ice and water tank, semiconductor copper radiator, positive temperature coefficient ceramic heating sheet, programmable power supply and magnifier.2) Lab VIEW platform is used to develop the functional module of control interface, serial instrument control interface, data acquisition, preprocessing module, data storage, query, TDMS file open and calculation in system.3) Heat source generating device for thermoelectric material performance test using positive temperature coefficient ceramic heating sheet has been designed, on which is based Lab VIEW and programmable power supply. The thermoelectric properties such as temperature difference, Seebeck coefficient, electrical resistivity, open circuit voltage, short circuit current and so on are realized.4) Thermal photovoltaic performance testing system of nano-materials, basing on Lab VIEW, of which is constructed with PC, Pico ammeters and magnifier, has been designed. That system could test the nano-materials' performance such as photo induced open circuit voltage, photo generated short circuit current and I/V characteristic.Finally, in order to verify the measurement accuracy of the system, using the system to measure the Seebeck coefficient of P-type silicon wafer, resistivity of Si NWs array, Thermal photovoltaic performance of Ni/Si NWs material and photoelectric properties of solar panel, then comparing the measured data with sample standard value or data measured by using standard test equipment,then analyzes the error, the reliability of the system is verified.Research results show that the thermophotovoltaic performance test system based on Lab VIEW is capable to measure the parameters of these materials accurately and automatically. The test system has a advantage of simple operation, low cost, programmable and development. It provides a new study testing equipment for nano-materials thermal photovoltaic performance research and has great scientific value in exploring novel nanostructured thermophotovoltaic materials.