New material recovers heat from the sun for cheaper electricity



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Scientists have developed a material that can be used to harvest electricity from the heat of the sun, paving the way for cheaper solar power generation on cloudy days and at night. .

Innovation is an important step to use solar heat. – the production of electricity in direct competition with fossil fuels, according to the researchers.

"Storing solar energy in the form of heat can already be cheaper than energy via batteries, so the next step is to reduce the cost of producing electricity from the heat of the Sun with the added benefit of zero greenhouse gas emissions, "said Kenneth Sandhage, a professor at the Purdue University in the United States

Concentrating Solar Power Plants Convert Solar energy is electricity using mirrors or lenses to focus a lot of light on a small surface generating heat that is transferred to a molten salt.

The heat of the molten salt is then transferred to a "working" fluid, supercritical carbon dioxide, which expands and rotates to spin a turbine to produce electricity.

For solar electricity to be cheaper, the turbine engine should generate even more electricity for the same amount of heat, which means that the engine needs to heat up warmer. .

The problem is that heat exchangers, which transfer the heat from hot molten salt to the working fluid, Currently, stainless steel or nickel-based alloys are too soft at the desired higher temperatures and to the high pressure of supercritical carbon dioxide.

Researchers designed a ceramic zirconium carbide and metallic tungsten composite for more robust heat exchangers.

They created ceramic-metal composite plates. The plates contain customizable channels to adapt the heat exchange.

Mechanical tests and corrosion tests have shown that the composite material can be adapted to successfully withstand the supercritical carbon dioxide at high temperature and high pressure required to produce electricity more efficiently [19659002] An economic badysis also showed that larger-scale manufacture of these heat exchangers could be achieved at a cost comparable to or lower than that of stainless-steel or nickel-alloy heat exchangers.

Technology would allow large-scale penetration of renewable solar energy into the electricity grid, "said Sandhage.

" This would mean a significant reduction in anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. resulting from the generation of electricity, "he said.

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