Thermal Concentration on Thermoelectric Thin Film for Efficient Solar Energy Harvesting

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript “Thermal Concentration on Thermoelectric Thin Film for Efficient Solar Energy Harvesting” by Liu et al. reported Thermoelectric generators based on p-type Bi₂Te₃, integrated with solar selective absorbing coating, and designed thermal concentration with an in-plane temperature gradient. This design strategy can achieve a large temperature gradient and a stable output of 0.83 µW for a 100x15x0.1 mm device under the illumination intensity of AM1.5G conditions. The study is certainly interesting and could be published in Coatings. However, first, the following minor suggestions have to be addressed by the authors:

1. The authors claim that their approach in this work is a new strategy. However, a comparison with other approaches (especially in terms of thermal concentration for TEG) in the previous works is not very well captured in the introduction.
2. Page 5: For the solar absorptance and thermal emittance reported in this work, are they weighted average over a certain wavelength range? If yes, please specify the wavelength range in the manuscript.
3. Page 8, line 231: I suggest the high output power of 0.83 µW obtained in this work could be compared with other thin-film TE generators in a good plot.

Further minor comments:

1. The quality of all figures should be improved.
2. Caption of Figure 2d: “solar” instead of “solor”

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In this manuscript there are several details that are not discuss; what are the materials involved, how the parts are joined. etc.

1. did the authors an analysis about the balance input vs. output in terms of energy.
2. The thermoelectric layers need to be relatively thick in order to increase the efficiency. What is the cost estimated? What will be the stability of the single layer and the layer contacts?
3. Some of the thermoelectrics are easily evaporated. Is there an experiment to show the feasibility?
4. Can you please comment on the cost of the system?

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

THIS WORK IS WELL-CONCEIVED AND NICELY CARRIED OUT. In my opinion the manuscript should be accept.