Solar steam generation by heat localization

Hadi Ghasemi, George Ni, Amy Marie Marconnet, James Loomis, Selcuk Yerci, Nenad Miljkovic and Gang Chen ()
Additional contact information
Hadi Ghasemi: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
George Ni: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amy Marie Marconnet: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
James Loomis: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Selcuk Yerci: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nenad Miljkovic: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Gang Chen: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Currently, steam generation using solar energy is based on heating bulk liquid to high temperatures. This approach requires either costly high optical concentrations leading to heat loss by the hot bulk liquid and heated surfaces or vacuum. New solar receiver concepts such as porous volumetric receivers or nanofluids have been proposed to decrease these losses. Here we report development of an approach and corresponding material structure for solar steam generation while maintaining low optical concentration and keeping the bulk liquid at low temperature with no vacuum. We achieve solar thermal efficiency up to 85% at only 10 kW m−2. This high performance results from four structure characteristics: absorbing in the solar spectrum, thermally insulating, hydrophilic and interconnected pores. The structure concentrates thermal energy and fluid flow where needed for phase change and minimizes dissipated energy. This new structure provides a novel approach to harvesting solar energy for a broad range of phase-change applications.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5449 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms5449

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5449

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().