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Application of Nanotechnology in Solar Energy and Solar Radiation

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A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "D3: Nanoenergy".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 July 2023) | Viewed by 5931

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Dr. Haichuan Jin

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Guest Editor

Laboratory of Fundamental Science on Ergonomics and Environmental Control, School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Interests: solar energy; nanotechnology; heat and mass transfer; nanofluid

Dr. Yanwei Hu

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Guest Editor

School of Energy Science & Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
Interests: solar energy; nanotechnology; heat and mass transfer

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With the rapid expansion of the social economy and a rising world population, there is a growing demand for energy in today’s world. Developing renewable and sustainable energy technologies, especially those exploiting solar energy, is thus of great importance to secure our energy future. However, many scientific and technical challenges must be addressed in order to accelerate the large-scale application and maturity of solar energy technologies. It was found that the use of nanotechnology in engineering may help to solve existing efficiency problems in current solar energy applications. The National Nanotechnology Initiative launched the Solar Nanotechnology Signature Initiative (NSI) in 2010 to improve our understanding of the conversion and storage phenomena at the nanoscale and advance nanoscale materials’ characterization and properties for solar technology. There is no doubt that nanotechnology has incredible potential in the fields of solar energy and solar radiation.

This Special Issue will present the latest findings on the application of nanotechnology in solar energy and solar radiation. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

All aspects of new solar energy utilization technologies with nanotechnology, such as direct absorption solar collectors, nanofluid, nanoparticles, solar pulsating heat pipe, etc.;
Improvement of solar thermal energy generation and conversion with nanotechnology;
Improvement of photovoltaic solar electricity generation with nanotechnology;
Improvement of photovoltaic/thermal applications with nanotechnology;
Improvement of solar-driven interfacial saline water evaporators.

Dr. Haichuan Jin
Dr. Yanwei Hu
Guest Editors

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Keywords

solar
energy
nanotechnology
photovoltaic/thermal applications
solar steam generation

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 3616 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Experimental Investigation on the Heat Transfer Characteristics of Multi-Point Heating Microchannels for Simulating Solar Cell Cooling

by Qi Yang, Yanpei Huang, Zitian Niu, Yuandong Guo, Qi Wu and Jianyin Miao

Energies 2022, 15(15), 5315; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15155315 - 22 Jul 2022

Viewed by 1385

Abstract

Concentrating photovoltaic power generation technology is a highly efficient way of utilizing solar energy resources with the efficiency limited by cell cooling conditions. For the heat dissipation problem from multi-point solar cell cooling, a microchannel heat sink is used to resolve the issue. Ammonia is chosen as the working fluid and two diamond microchannel heat sinks in series for the 16 simulated solar cells cooling with typical size. The heat sink consists of 31 triangular microchannels, each with a hydraulic diameter of 237 μm and a flow path length of 40 mm. It is experimentally verified that the diamond microchannel heat sink has excellent multi-point heat source heat dissipation capability. The surface temperature of the heat source can be controlled below 65.9 °C under the heat flux of 351.5 W/cm², and the maximum temperature difference between the multi-point heat sources is only 1.4 °C. The effects of heat flux, mass flux and inlet state on the flow boiling heat transfer capacity within the series heat sinks were investigated and the ranges of the operating conditions are as follows: heat flux 90.8–351.5 W/cm², mass flux 108–611 kg/(m²s), saturation temperature 15–23 °C and inlet temperature 15–21 °C. The results show that within the range of experimental conditions, the flow boiling heat transfer capacity of the series heat sink increases with the increase of heat flux and is less influenced by the mass flux, showing the typical two-phase heat transfer characteristics dominated by the nucleation boiling mechanism. Between the upstream and downstream heat sinks, the thermal resistance of the upstream heat sink is larger and the temperature uniformity of the downstream heat sink is poor because of the difference of the inlet state. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Nanotechnology in Solar Energy and Solar Radiation)

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13 pages, 2282 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Thermal Characteristic of Novel Insulation Materials Designed for Solar Simulator

by Wenjing Ding, Ying Zhou, Miao Gu, Jie Gong and Jinghao Xu

Energies 2022, 15(13), 4831; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15134831 - 1 Jul 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1269

Abstract

The solar simulator is an important device for simulating solar irradiation in cold black and vacuum environments and has a wide range of application prospects. In this work, a method of thermal conductivity measurement by a double specimen protection thermal plate method under vacuum conditions was proposed, and the thermal conductivity of a new thermal insulation material under a cryogenic vacuum environment was studied. By designing a vacuum adjustment device and a multi-layer insulation structure with a low outgassing rate, it is possible to adjust the vacuum pressure from 10⁻⁴ Pa to atmospheric. A temperature control and thermal conductivity test can be realized from −160 °C to 280 °C by the joint temperature control of liquid nitrogen cooling and electric heating. Then, the measurement accuracy of the device was checked by the national standard sample, the thermal conductivity of the sample was measured under different vacuum and temperature conditions, the uncertainty analysis of the device was given, and, finally, the thermal conductivity of the new material was tested. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Nanotechnology in Solar Energy and Solar Radiation)

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16 pages, 5997 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Experimental Investigation on Solar–Thermal Conversion and Migration Characteristics of Nanofluids

by Haoyang Sun, Guiping Lin, Haichuan Jin, Ying Zhou and Kuiyuan Ma

Energies 2022, 15(9), 3282; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15093282 - 30 Apr 2022

Viewed by 1491

Abstract

Solar–thermal conversion and migration characteristics of nanofluids have attracted intensive attention recently. Due to the strong absorption of solar energy, solar collectors with nanofluids have wide applications in many areas including desalination and power generation. Researchers have mainly focused on the macroscopic performance of nanofluids in solar collectors, but the nanoparticles’ migration characteristics with vapor during phase transformation have not been further investigated. Therefore, an experimental investigation on solar–thermal conversion characteristics of nanofluids and migration characteristics with vapor during phase transformation was conducted in this work, in order to verify the enhancement effect of nanoparticles on solar energy absorption and explore the nanoparticles’ migration behavior with vapor. It was found that part of Ag nanoparticles migrate out of the nanofluids with generated vapor by boiling nanofluids, and most of the nanoparticles remained in the nanofluids. In addition, more Ag nanoparticles migrated with vapor with the increased heating power. The concentration of migrated nanofluids was 20.58 ppm with a power of 16.2 W and 31.39 ppm with a power of 20 W. The investigation pointed out the potential danger of nanofluids in the process of utility and provided a reference for the standardized application of nanofluids. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Nanotechnology in Solar Energy and Solar Radiation)

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14 pages, 4012 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Heat Transfer Enhancement Using Micro Porous Structured Surfaces

by Kai Zhang and Haichuan Jin

Energies 2022, 15(9), 3108; https://doi.org/10.3390/en15093108 - 24 Apr 2022

Viewed by 1260

Abstract

The parabolic trough solar collector as a popular technique is widely used in solar concentrating technologies (SCTs). The solar absorber tube is the key position of the trough solar thermal power system. The internal modification of the absorber tube is one of the most interesting techniques for increasing the collector’s performance. At present, most of the methods to enhance heat transfer efficiency focus on designing alternative parabolic trough collectors (PTC) absorbers and improving the internal structure of absorption tubes. Due to the limitation of temperature range, most absorption tubes use oil as heat absorbing liquid, and very few heat absorbing tubes directly use water as working fluid. This is because water is limited by critical heat flux in high temperature environment, resulting in low heat transfer performance. In this work, we designed a new porous absorber tube with the function of allowing liquid resupply and vapor overflow from different paths, which can effectively improve the critical heat flux of the absorber tube when using distilled water as working fluid. In order to obtain better heat transfer performance of the absorber and verify the feasibility of vapor–liquid separation mechanism, a simplified model of the absorber was carried out in pool boiling. In this work, we fabricated an arterial porous structure with the function of regulating vapor–liquid flow path based on vacuum sintering technique, and the effect of different heating methods on boiling heat transfer performance are analyzed. The maximum heat flux of 450 W/cm² was achieved without any dry-out at the superheat of 42 °C, and the unique evaporation/boiling curve was obtained. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Nanotechnology in Solar Energy and Solar Radiation)

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