An engineering team at the University of California, San Diego has developed a new nanoparticle-based solar power material that eclipses previous designs.

The material is designed to absorb and convert more than 90% of the sunlight it captures, last years longer than current absorber materials and can withstand temperatures exceeding 700 degrees Celsius. Today’s solar absorber material functions at lower temperatures and needs to be overhauled almost every year for high-temperature operations.

“We wanted to create a material that absorbs sunlight that doesn’t let any of it escape. We want the black hole of sunlight,” says Sungho Jin, a professor in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering.

The material does this with a “multiscale” surface structure created by using different sized particles, ranging from 10 nanometers to 10 micrometers. This allows it to capture and absorb more sunlight.

The synthesized boride-coated nanoshell material is spray-painted onto a metal substrate for thermal and mechanical testing in the lab, according to a university news release. The material’s ability to absorb sunlight was measured using instruments that take spectral measurements from visible light to infrared.

The goal of this research was to develop a sun-trapping material to replace the kind being used in current concentrating solar power (CSP) electric generating plants. In most CSP systems, more than 100,000 reflective mirrors are used to aim sunlight at a tower that has been coated with light-absorbing black paint material, which is designed to minimize the loss of light and maximize light absorption.

The 3-year effort was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot program, which challenged UC San Diego research teams to develop a material with a longer lifecycle and higher operating temperature for “enhanced energy conversion efficiency,” according to the news release. The research team was made up of graduate students in materials science and engineering.

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