Fabry-Perot cavity amplification of near-field thermal rectification

We design a thermal rectifier based on near-field thermal radiation between a p-type lightly doped silicon bulk (p-LDSi) and a Fabry-Perot (F-P) cavity, made of alternating metal films and p-LDSi films on metal substrate. Our results show that the introduction of F-P cavity arouses markedly near-field thermal rectification ratio owing to the selective emittance and absorption. Significantly, the performance of the designed rectifier exceeds the simple rectifier between the p-LDSi substrate and the metal substrate. Meanwhile a good rectification ratio can still be achieved at a large vacuum gap. Furthermore, in order to solve the multidimensional optimization difficulties often encountered in designing thermal rectifier devices, the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) is employed to build the optimal reconstruction scheme by solving the inverse problem for the thermal rectifier. This paper exploits a new lane to improve the performance of thermal rectifiers, and may have wide applications in thermal management of microchip.