Solar absorber concentrates efforts on solar power plants

The research is claimed to advance global efforts to design hybrid systems that combine solar photovoltaic cells, which convert visible and ultraviolet light into electricity, thermoelectric devices that convert heat into electricity, and steam turbines to generate electricity. The thermoelectric devices and steam turbines would be driven by heat collected and stored using mirrors to focus sunlight onto a selective solar absorber and reflector.

To efficiently collect heat from the sun, specially designed surfaces based on low-cost materials are needed to selectively absorb photons from a certain range of the light spectrum while reflecting others.

“The key point is that to capture sunlight as efficiently as possible you have to do two things that compete with each other: one is to absorb as much power from the sun as possible, but secondly, not reradiate that power,” said Peter Bermel, lead researcher and assistant professor in Purdue University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.