Contactless steam generation and superheating under one sun illumination
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s41467-018-07494-2.pdf
Size
1.48 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Cooper, Thomas A
Zandavi, Seyed Hadi
Ni, George Wei
Tsurimaki, Yoichiro
Huang, Yi
Boriskina, Svetlana V
Chen, Gang
Date Issued
December 2018
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Cooper, Thomas A.et al. “Contactless Steam Generation and Superheating Under One Sun Illumination.” Nature Communications 9, 1 (December 2018): 5086 © 2018 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Steam generation using solar energy provides the basis for many sustainable desalination, sanitization, and process heating technologies. Recently, interest has arisen for low-cost floating structures that absorb solar radiation and transfer energy to water via thermal conduction, driving evaporation. However, contact between water and the structure leads to fouling and pins the vapour temperature near the boiling point. Here we demonstrate solar-driven evaporation using a structure not in contact with water. The structure absorbs solar radiation and re-radiates infrared photons, which are directly absorbed by the water within a sub-100 μm penetration depth. Due to the physical separation from the water, fouling is entirely avoided. Due to the thermal separation, the structure is no longer pinned at the boiling point, and is used to superheat the generated steam. We generate steam with temperatures up to 133 °C, demonstrating superheated steam in a non-pressurized system under one sun illumination.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07494-2
