Traditional solar power methods work by trapping the sun’s light to produce electricity. In order to boil water using the solar energy, you would usually need an array of motorized sun-tracking mirrors in which to focus the sunlight. But, this a very costly process even when dealing with just a small amount of water. However, researchers have now found a way to produce solar power by trapping the sun’s heat instead.
Gang Chen and fellow MIT colleagues set to work reducing the amount of heat lost to convection, conduction, and radiation within the system. The researchers managed to capture the sunlight using a spectrally selective absorber to ensure radiative losses were kept to a minimum. Both conductive and convective losses are also limited by sandwiching the absorber in between layers of polystyrene foam and bubble wrap. Then, once the heat has been absorbed the only place it can escape is through the area that the absorber connects with water, and steadily brings it to a boil.
The good thing about this device is that it only needs intermittent periods of the sun to work efficiently as heats up after only a few minutes when in direct sunlight. Currently, the system they used is only 10cm in diameter, but the researchers are working to have the system working on a much larger scale. All the components used are both inexpensive and readily available, so there is no reason they can not be used today across the world to allow an even cheaper, more efficient, clean source of energy than is currently available.
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