@article{497318ea5d53413b8f0aa6f8465dbce0,
title = "Volumetric solar heating of nanofluids for direct vapor generation",
abstract = "Traditional solar-thermal receivers suffer from high surface temperatures, which increase heat losses to the surroundings. To improve performance, volumetric receivers based on nanoparticles suspended in liquid (nanofluids) have been studied as an approach to reduce surface losses by localizing high temperatures to the interior of the receiver. Here, we report measured vapor generation efficiencies of 69\% at solar concentrations of 10. sun using graphitized carbon black, carbon black, and graphene suspended in water, representing a significant improvement in both transient and steady-state performance over previously reported results. To elucidate the vapor generation mechanism and validate our experimental results, we develop numerical and analytical heat transfer models that suggest that nanofluid heating and vapor generation occur due to classical global heating of the suspension fluid. This work demonstrates high nanofluid-assisted vapor generation efficiencies with potential applications in power generation, distillation, and sterilization.",
keywords = "Nanofluid, Nanoparticle, Solar energy, Steam generation, Vapor generation, Volumetric receiver",
author = "George Ni and Nenad Miljkovic and Hadi Ghasemi and Xiaopeng Huang and Boriskina, \{Svetlana V.\} and Lin, \{Cheng Te\} and Jianjian Wang and Yanfei Xu and Rahman, \{Md Mahfuzur\} and Zhang, \{Tie Jun\} and Gang Chen",
note = "Funding Information: Gang Chen is currently the Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the director of the {"}Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center (S 3 TEC Center){"} – an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Mechanical Engineering Department, UC Berkeley, in 1993. He was an assistant professor at Duke University, a tenured associate professor at UC Los Angeles, before moving to MIT. In 2010, he was elected a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. Funding Information: We thank K. McEnaney and D. Kraemer with help operating the solar simulator, and T. McClure and the Center for Materials Science and Engineering for the use of the UV–vis Spectrophotometer. This work has implications in solar steam generation, and was partially supported by the Cooperative Agreement between the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (Masdar Institute), Abu Dhabi, UAE and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA - Reference 02/MI/MIT/CP/11/07633/GEN/G/00 (for the steam generation). We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the MIT S3TEC Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award \# DE-FG02-09ER46577 (for the experimental facility). Some of the existing infrastructure used in the research was purchased under the S3TEC Grant . This work was performed in part at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), which is supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Award no. ECS-0335765 . CNS is part of Harvard University. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2015 Elsevier Ltd.",
year = "2015",
month = oct,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1016/j.nanoen.2015.08.021",
language = "British English",
volume = "17",
pages = "290--301",
journal = "Nano Energy",
issn = "2211-2855",
publisher = "Elsevier B.V.",
}
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