Commercial Industrial Institutional News Residential
Spongelike structure converts solar energy into steam

The new material is able to convert 85% of incoming solar energy into steam, says MIT, boasting it is a “significant improvement over recent approaches to solar-powered steam generation”. What’s more, the setup loses very little heat in the process, and can produce steam at relatively low solar intensity. This could mean that, when scaled up, the setup would likely not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.

Hadi Ghasemi, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, says the spongelike structure can be made from relatively inexpensive materials.

“Steam is important for desalination, hygiene systems and sterilization,” says Ghasemi, who led the development of the structure. “Especially in remote areas where the sun is the only source of energy… if you can generate steam with solar energy, it would be very useful.”

Currently, solar-powered steam generation involves fields of mirrors or lenses that concentrate incoming sunlight, heating large volumes of liquid to high enough temperatures to produce steam. However, these systems can experience significant heat loss, says MIT, leading to inefficient steam generation.

Recently, scientists have explored ways to improve the efficiency of solar-thermal harvesting by developing new solar receivers and 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, notes MIT—about 1000 times that of an average sunny day.

But the MIT approach generates steam at a solar intensity about 10x that of a sunny day—the lowest optical concentration reported thus far, says MIT. This suggests steam-generating applications that can function with lower sunlight concentration and less-expensive tracking systems.

“This is a huge advantage in cost-reduction,” Ghasemi says. “That’s exciting for us because we’ve come up with a new approach to solar steam generation.”

The approach itself is relatively simple: since steam is generated at the surface of a liquid, Ghasemi looked for a material that could both efficiently absorb sunlight and generate steam at a liquid’s surface. After trials with multiple materials, he settled on a thin, double-layered, disc-shaped structure. Its top layer is made from graphite that the researchers exfoliated by placing the material in a microwave. The effect, says mechanical engineering department head Gang Chen, is “just like popcorn”: the graphite bubbles up, forming a nest of flakes. The result is a highly porous material that can better absorb and retain solar energy.

The structure’s bottom layer is a carbon foam that contains pockets of air to keep the foam afloat and act as an insulator, preventing heat from escaping to the underlying liquid. The foam also contains very small pores that allow water to creep up through the structure via capillary action.

As sunlight hits the structure, it creates a hotspot in the graphite layer, generating a pressure gradient that draws water up through the carbon foam. As water seeps into the graphite layer, the heat concentrated in the graphite turns the water into steam. The structure works much like a sponge that, when placed in water on a hot, sunny day, can continuously absorb and evaporate liquid.

The researchers tested the structure by placing it in a chamber of water and exposing it to a solar simulator. They found they were able to convert 85% of solar energy into steam at a solar intensity 10x that of a typical sunny day. Ghasemi says the structure may be designed to be even more efficient, depending on the type of materials used.

“There can be different combinations of materials that can be used in these two layers that can lead to higher efficiencies at lower concentrations,” Ghasemi says. “There is still a lot of research that can be done on implementing this in larger systems.”

— With files from Jennifer Chu, MIT