The latest research uses ceramic metal plates to conduct heat at higher temperatures and higher pressures, thereby improving the efficiency of solar power generation.
Recently, American scientists have developed a new type of material and manufacturing process that uses solar energy as heat energy to generate electricity more efficiently.
In addition to the use of power generation and power storage on cloudy days and nights, solar power is a low-cost energy solution, but solar power accounts for only 2% of the US power source. A research team at Purdue University in the United States has developed a new type of material and manufacturing process to make the method of generating electricity using solar energy (ie, thermal energy) more efficient and feasible.
This technological innovation is an important part of direct competition between solar power generation and fossil fuel power generation. Fossil fuel power generation currently accounts for more than 60% of the total power generation in the United States. Professor Kenneth Sandhage, a professor of materials engineering at Purdue University, said: "Storing solar energy in the form of thermal energy is cheaper than storing energy in the form of batteries, so the next step is to reduce the cost of solar power and reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
The study was completed in collaboration with Purdue University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and was published in the recently published "Nature" magazine.
The use of solar energy is not only through the solar panels on the farm or roof to obtain thermal power generation, people can also use solar thermal energy to generate electricity. Centralized solar power stations use mirrors or lenses to collect a large amount of light in a small area, thereby converting solar energy into electrical energy, and the heat generated is transferred to molten salt. The heat of the molten salt is then transferred to a "working fluid"-supercritical carbon dioxide, which expands, causing the turbine to rotate to generate electricity during operation.
In order to effectively reduce the cost of solar power generation, the turbine engine needs to generate more electricity with the same heat, which means that it operates at a higher temperature. The technical bottleneck of this process is the heat exchanger, which transfers the heat of the hot molten salt to the "working fluid". At present, the heat exchanger is made of stainless steel or nickel alloy materials, under ideal high temperature conditions and supercritical carbon dioxide pressure These materials will become soft.
It is understood that the design inspiration of Kenneth Sandhage comes from the "synthetic material" previously made with colleagues. This material is used to manufacture solid fuel rocket nozzles, which can withstand high temperature and high pressure. Currently, Kenneth Sandhage is collaborating with Asegun Henry from MIT to design a similar synthetic material to make harder heat exchangers.
The combination of ceramic zirconium carbide and metal tungsten, these two materials into a complex material can produce unexpected effects. Researchers at Purdue University have produced ceramic-metal composite plates, based on simulation channels designed by Devesh Ranjan of the Georgia Institute of Technology, which show that the composite plates can be used for custom channels to achieve heat conversion.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Edgar Lara-Curzio research team conducted mechanical tests on the composite material, and the Mark Anderson research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted corrosion tests. These tests show that this new composite material can be customized to adapt to supercritical carbon dioxide. High-temperature and high-pressure conditions, thereby generating electricity more efficiently than current heat exchangers.
An analysis by researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University shows that heat exchangers made of new materials can achieve large-scale production at the same or lower cost than stainless steel or nickel alloy heat exchangers.
Kenneth Sandhage said that with the continuous development of technology, the technology will extend its penetration from large-scale renewable solar energy to the field of power grids, which means that human-made carbon dioxide emissions in power production will be greatly reduced.
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