Solar power, with a side of hot running water
MIT researchers and their collaborators have come up with an unusual, highly efficient and possibly less expensive way of turning the sun’s heat into electricity. Their system, described in a paper published online in the journal Nature Materials on May 1, produces power with an efficiency roughly eight times higher than ever previously reported for a solar thermoelectric device — one that produces electricity from solar heat. It does so by generating and harnessing a temperature difference of about 200 degrees Celsius between the interior of the device and the ambient air.The concept “is very radical,” says Gang Chen, MIT’s Carl Richard Soderberg Professor in Power Engineering and director of the Pappalardo Micro and Nano Engineering Laboratories, who co-authored the new paper with MIT doctoral student Daniel Kraemer and collaborators from Boston College and GMZ Energy. The work is funded by the Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center, an Energy Frontier...