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Steam generation under one sun enabled by a floating structure with thermal concentration

Nature Energy volume 1, Article number: 16126 (2016) Cite this article

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Abstract

Harvesting solar energy as heat has many applications, such as power generation, residential water heating, desalination, distillation and wastewater treatment. However, the solar flux is diffuse, and often requires optical concentration, a costly component, to generate the high temperatures needed for some of these applications. Here we demonstrate a floating solar receiver capable of generating 100 ∘C steam under ambient air conditions without optical concentration. The high temperatures are achieved by using thermal concentration and heat localization, which reduce the convective, conductive and radiative heat losses. This demonstration of a low-cost and scalable solar vapour generator holds the promise of significantly expanding the application domain and reducing the cost of solar thermal systems.

The sun is a promising and abundant source of renewable energy that can potentially solve many of society’s challenges. Solar thermal technologies, that is, the conversion of the sunlight to thermal energy, are being developed for many applications, such as power generation, domestic water heating, desalination, and other industrial processes1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Steam and vapour generation is often desired in these applications, but the dilute solar flux (1,000 W m−2) does not provide enough power per unit area of the absorber to reach the required high temperatures and to compensate for the large latent heat of water vaporization. Optical concentrators, such as parabolic troughs, heliostats and lenses, can concentrate the ambient solar flux tens or even thousands of times to achieve high temperatures8,9,10,11,12. Plasmonic nanoparticles with absorption and scattering cross-sections exceeding their geometrical cross-sections have been recently developed and applied for direct solar steam generation13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24, but they typically require optical concentration of 10–1,000× for steam generation However, optical concentrators are expensive (US$200 m−2)25, often accounting for a major portion of the capital cost of solar thermal systems8,11,26. In addition, they require support structures and access to electrical energy to track the sun. Although optical concentration is at present necessary for applications that require high temperatures, such as concentrated solar power generation, solar thermal technologies that reduce or completely eliminate the reliance on optical concentration would have better market penetration. Worldwide, the use of non-concentrated solar thermal power (∼200 GW)27 outnumbers the use of concentrated solar thermal power (∼5 GW).

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Figure 1: Operating principles of steam generation at one sun.
Figure 2: One-sun, ambient steam generator.
Figure 3: Vapour generation experimental results.
Figure 4: Outdoor performance under natural sunlight.
Figure 5: Analysis of a large-scale OAS performance.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Kraemer with help operating the solar simulator, and T. McClure and the Center for Materials Science and Engineering for the use of the FTIR. This work 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, Massachusetts, 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). We also thank Z. Lu and E. Wang for their help in understanding the evaporation processes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

    George Ni, Gabriel Li, Svetlana V. Boriskina & Gang Chen

  2. Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, PO Box 54224, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Hongxia Li, Weilin Yang & TieJun Zhang

Authors
  1. George Ni
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  2. Gabriel Li
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  3. Svetlana V. Boriskina
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  4. Hongxia Li
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Contributions

G.N., S.V.B. and G.C. developed the concept. G.N. and G.L. conducted the experiments. G.N., H.L., W.Y. and T.Z. prepared the models. G.N., S.V.B. and G.C. wrote the paper. G.C. directed the overall research.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gang Chen.

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The authors have applied for a patent for this technology, but have no other competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Figures 1–10, Supplementary Notes 1–8, Supplementary References. (PDF 804 kb)

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Ni, G., Li, G., Boriskina, S. et al. Steam generation under one sun enabled by a floating structure with thermal concentration. Nat Energy 1, 16126 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nenergy.2016.126

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