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Scientists have developed a material that can be used to harvest electricity from the Sun's heat, paving the way for generating cheaper solar power on cloudy days and at nighttime.
The innovation is an important step for putting fossil fuels, researchers said.
"Storing solar energy can be cheaper than storing energy via batteries," said Kenneth Sandhage, a professor at Purdue, "the next step is reducing the cost of generating electricity from the Sun's heat, University in the US.
Concentrated solar power plants converting solar energy into the environment by using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a small amount of light on a small area, which generates heat that is transferred to a molten salt.
Heat from the molten salt is then transferred to a "working" fluid, supercritical carbon dioxide, which expands and works to spin a turbine for generating electricity.
To make solar-powered electricity cheaper, the turbine engine would need to generate more electricity for the same amount of heat, which means the engine needs to run hotter.
The problem is that heat exchangers, which transfer heat from the hot molten salt to the working fluid, are currently made of stainless steel or nickel-based alloys that get too soft at the desired higher temperatures and at the elevated pressure of supercritical carbon dioxide.
Researchers conceived a composite of ceramic zirconium carbide and the metal tungsten for more robust heat exchangers.
They created plates of the ceramic-metal composite. The plates host customizable channels for tailoring the exchange of heat.
Mechanical tests and corrosion tests showed that the composite material could be more efficient than high-pressure, high-pressure supercritical carbon dioxide needed for generating electricity more efficiently than today's heat exchangers.
An economic analysis also shows that the scaling-up of these heat exchangers could be comparable to those of the steel or nickel-based alloys.
"Ultimately, with continued development, this technology would allow for large-scale penetration of renewable solar energy into the grid electricity," Sandhage said.
"This would mean dramatic reductions in human-made carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production," he said.
(This story has been edited by Business Standard staff and is self-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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