YouTube video

Researchers create solar steam using nanoparticles at Rice University. Credit: Rice Univ.

From Futurity.org:

New technology that uses nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam is so effective it even works with icy cold water.

The solar steam method has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent. Photovoltaic solar panels, by comparison, typically have an overall energy efficiency around 15 percent. Inventors of solar steam expect the first uses of the new technology won’t be for electricity generation but rather for sanitation and water purification in developing countries.

“This is about a lot more than electricity,” says Naomi Halas of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University. “With this technology, we are beginning to think about solar thermal power in a completely different way.”

As reported in ACS Nano (“Solar Vapor Generation Enabled by Nanoparticles, doi:10.1021/nn304948h), the efficiency of solar steam is due to the light-capturing nanoshells and nanoparticles that convert sunlight into heat. The researchers tested solutions containing two materials: 1) SiO2/Au nanoshells and 2) water soluble N115 carbon nanoparticles with equivalent integrated optical densities (from 400 nm to 1300 nm in wavelength)When submerged in water and exposed to sunlight, the particles heat up so quickly they instantly vaporize water and create steam. Halas says the solar steam’s overall energy efficiency can probably be increased as the technology is refined.

“We’re going from heating water on the macro scale to heating it at the nanoscale,” Halas says. “Our particles are very small-even smaller than a wavelength of light-which means they have an extremely small surface area to dissipate heat. This intense heating allows us to generate steam locally, right at the surface of the particle, and the idea of generating steam locally is really counterintuitive.”

To show just how counterintuitive, Rice graduate student Oara Neumann videotaped a solar steam demonstration {above) in which a test tube of water containing light-activated nanoparticles was submerged into a bath of ice water. Using a lens to concentrate sunlight onto the near-freezing mixture in the tube, Neumann showed she could create steam from nearly frozen water.

Steam is one of the world’s most-used industrial fluids. About 90 percent of electricity is produced from steam, and steam is also used to sterilize medical waste and surgical instruments, to prepare food, and to purify water.

Most industrial steam is produced in large boilers-solar steam’s efficiency could allow it to become economical on a much smaller scale.

People in developing countries will be among the first to see the benefits of solar steam. Rice engineering undergraduates have already created a solar steam-powered autoclave that’s capable of sterilizing medical and dental instruments at clinics that lack electricity. Halas also won a Grand Challenges grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create an ultra-small-scale system for treating human waste in areas without sewer systems or electricity.

“Solar steam is remarkable because of its efficiency,” says Neumann, the lead co-author on the paper. “It does not require acres of mirrors or solar panels. In fact, the footprint can be very small. For example, the light window in our demonstration autoclave was just a few square centimeters.”

Another potential use could be in powering hybrid air-conditioning and heating systems that run off of sunlight during the day and electricity at night. Halas, Neumann, and colleagues have also conducted distillation experiments and found that solar steam is about two-and-a-half times more efficient than existing distillation columns.

Halas, a professor in electrical and computer engineering and of physics, chemistry, and biomedical engineering, specializes in creating and studying light-activated particles. One of her creations, gold nanoshells, is the subject of several clinical trials for cancer treatment.

For the cancer treatment technology and many other applications, Halas’ team chooses particles that interact with just a few wavelengths of light. For the solar steam project, Halas and Neumann set out to design a particle that would interact with the widest possible spectrum of sunlight energy. Their new nanoparticles are activated by both visible sunlight and shorter wavelengths that humans cannot see.

“We’re not changing any of the laws of thermodynamics,” Halas says. “We’re just boiling water in a radically different way.”

The research was supported by the Welch Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

CTT Categories

  • Energy
  • Material Innovations
  • Nanomaterials