Researchers exploit black metal with turbocharge solar energy

Several years ago, an expert in optics developed a technique to shoot black brilliant metals. The trick has led to a material perfectly suited to the absorption of the sun – so much so that the generators built with it produced 15 times more power than the comparable devices.

The team used black metal to develop a new design for thermoelectric solar generators. Known as Stegs, they can convert various thermal energy types to electricity. However, technological limitations have considerably slowed down their potential, with energy production only converting 1% of sunlight into electricity – mediocre compared to around 20% for residential solar panel systems. The new design, published on August 12 in Light: Science & Applications, overcomes this challenge by allowing very precise control on each layer of the device, some of which were built in black metal.

Stegs normally have “hot” and “cold” sides sandwiched by semiconductor materials, and the temperature difference between the two sides generates electricity through a phenomenon called Seebeck effects. For decades, the emphasis was on the improvement of semiconductor materials to better control the heat difference, as explained by Chunlei Guo, principal author of the University of Rochester, in a press release. This approach had a limited success, which is why Guo – the creator of black metal technology – explored other elements, namely these hot and cold sides.

Guo Articula’s design on three manufacturing strategies that were based strongly on lasers. First of all, his team treated tungsten with femtosecond laser impulses – ultra -short beams flashing the metal with a second quadrillionema ladders – to transform it into black metal. More specifically, they designed the material so that it is optimized to absorb sunlight while minimizing the possibility of unwanted heat losses.

Then they covered the tungsten treated with a piece of plastic, making a “mini greenhouse” which has maximized the capacity on the hot side to trap the heat, said Guo. Finally, to balance things, the team has once again used female lasers to make a special aluminum heat sink. These nanostructures have doubled the cooling performance on the cold side, the researchers explained.

To validate their design, the team has made a simple experience in which it tested this thermal management design by lighting LEDs. As expected, their configuration allowed the STEG to fully feed the LED with maximum brightness at considerably lower lighting levels, researchers wrote in the study. The device is also compact and relatively light, which means that it could “potentially supply microelectronic devices, such as autonomous sensors for meteorological surveillance and agricultural applications, and intelligent devices,” said the study.

For metal music fans And Solar energy, this research should not surprise. Regarding clean energy, black metal is really hard.