Produce steam without boiling water using solar energy

  • 2012

A revolutionary new way to produce steam using solar energy discovered by researchers, also involves the introduction of nano particles in solar technology.

This new technique potentially has many applications, such as the creation of economic and compact devices to purify water, sterilization of medical equipment, wastewater treatment or alcohol distillation much more efficiently.

"This research opens the doors of a revolutionary application of nano particles in solar energy, " says Paul Weiss of ACS Nano, the magazine where the article has been published. "The authors demonstrate that sunlight can be used to produce steam without virtually wasting any heat on the surrounding liquid."

The method is based on the use of metal nano particles that absorb large amounts of light, which causes a significant increase in its temperature. Previous research on the use of nano particles in solar energy technologies, focused on increasing the ability of fluids to conduct heat, but none so far, had mixed nano particles in fluids directly to test their abilities. As the investigation concludes, the effects are very interesting.

The report says that nano particles illuminated by sunlight can reach temperatures above 100 degrees Celsius. Vapor forms around the surface of nano particles, billions of which can be mixed in water or other fluids. Finally, the vapor leaves the particles in the form of nano vapor bubbles that float to the surface of the fluid.

The report documents in detail the different amounts of steam generated with different types of nanoparticles. The different types that were experimented with were silicon dioxide / gold and others with carbon. Both solutions produced steam after 5-20 seconds of sun exposure. The researchers also managed to distill alcohol with nano gold particles, without having to boil the water.

The efficiency of this technology is one of the most striking aspects, up to 82% of the solar light was absorbed by the nanoparticles and destined to the production of steam. The overall efficiency of the entire process was 24% and this without having made any optimization effort.

This breakthrough has been published by the American Chemical Society (ACS) in the ACS Nano magazine.

Produce steam without boiling water using solar energy

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