Excerpt: Today, solar-powered steam generation involves vast fields of mirrors or lenses that concentrate incoming sunlight, heating large volumes of liquid to high enough temperatures to produce steam. However, these complex systems can experience significant heat loss, leading to inefficient steam generation. Recently, scientists have explored ways to improve the efficiency of solar-thermal harvesting by developing new solar receivers and by working with nanofluids. The latter approach involves mixing water with nanoparticles that heat up quickly when exposed to sunlight, vaporizing the surrounding water molecules as steam. But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy—about 1,000 times that of an average sunny day. By contrast, the MIT approach generates steam at a solar intensity about 10 times that of a sunny day—the lowest optical concentration reported thus far. The implication, the researchers say, is that steam-generating applications can function with lower sunlight concentration and less-expensive tracking systems. This is a huge advantage in cost-reduction, Ghasemi says. Thats exciting for us because weve come up with a new approach to solar steam generation.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 14:11:36 +0000
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