Researchers Look To New Process To Harvest Solar Energy

Researchers Look To New Process To Harvest Solar Energy
Since the seventh century B.C., mankind has looked to the power of the sun to provide an energy source.Examine the tray and locate the bars that will align with the slots on the sides of the Thermal printer OEM. Line those bars up with the slots inside the printer. In the earliest days, humans used glass and mirrors to concentrate the sun's rays to make fire. Later,Of course this presented what appeared to be an insurmountable problem for the Earth auger as they could not close off the fairway to install the required cables. around the first century A.D., the Romans discovered large south facing windows could help let in the sun's warmth. There's even one infamous tale of Greek scientist Archimedes using bronze shields to reflect and focus sunlight to set fire to invading wooden ships.More recently, there have been great strides in actually converting sunlight into electricity – either by photovoltaics (PV) or indirectly using concentrated solar power (CSP).We enhance the competitiveness of our crusher customers and advance sustainable industrial development worldwide with best available technologies. Now a new method of harvesting the sun's energy could be emerging.
Scientists at UC Santa Barbara's (UCSB) Departments of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials have delved into new research to convert sunlight into energy using a process based on metals. This line of research promises to be more robust than many of the semiconductors used in conventional methods.The findings were published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology."It is the first radically new and potentially workable alternative to semiconductor-based solar conversion devices to be developed in the past 70 years or so,metal machining"said Martin Moskovits, professor of chemistry at UCSB.
This new process involves sunlight hitting the surface of a semiconductor material, with one side being electron-rich while the other side is not. When the photon, or light particle, excites the electrons this causes them to leave their positions, whereby positively-charged "holes" are created. The result is a current of these charged particles that can then be captured and utilized to power light bulbs, charge batteries or even facilitate chemical reactions."For example, the electrons might cause hydrogen ions in water to be converted into hydrogen, a fuel, while the holes produce oxygen," Moskovits added.solar mountingThe technology developed by Moskovits and his team as UCSB – which included postdoctoral researchers Syed Mubeen and Joun Lee; grad student Nirala Singh; materials engineer Stephan Kraemer; and chemistry professor Galen Stucky – does not use a semiconductor material to provide the electronics and venue with a conversion to solar energy. Instead, it utilizes nanostructured metals – what the team referred to as a "forest" of gold nanorods – which were capped with a layer of crystalline titanium dioxide decorated with platinum nanoparticles and set in water.