For GSS Energy Use chapter 8. Excerpt: It’s an obvious truism, but one that may soon be outdated: The
problem with solar power is that sometimes the sun doesn’t shine. Now a
team at MIT and Harvard University has come up with an
ingenious workaround — a material that can absorb the sun’s heat and
store that energy in chemical form, ready to be released again on
demand. This solution is no solar-energy panacea: While it could produce
electricity, it would be inefficient at doing so. But for applications
where heat is the desired output — whether for heating buildings,
cooking, or powering heat-based industrial processes — this could
provide an opportunity for the expansion of solar power into new realms.
...Unlike fuels that are burned, this system uses material that can be
continually reused. It produces no emissions and nothing gets
consumed...The adoption of carbon nanotubes to increase materials’
energy storage
density is “clever,”...the resulting increase in energy storage density
“is surprising and remarkable.” “This result provides additional
motivation for researchers to design
more and better photochromic compounds and composite materials that
optimize the storage of solar energy in chemical bonds,” Kanai says... http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/molecular-approach-to-solar-power. By David L. Chandle, MIT News Office. |
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