Plasmonic nanofluids enhanced solar thermal transfer liquid

Abstract

Plasmonic nanostructures suspended in a liquid are known to offer enhanced absorption of light and improved photo-thermal efficiency comparing with conventional solar absorbers. This approach localizes high temperatures to the interior of the liquid through efficient trapping of incoming light via scattering and absorption mechanisms. Theoretical studies show that Ag exhibits the highest efficiency of plasmonic excitations, and the plasmonic absorption band can be shifted to cover the visible wavelength ranges by loading the Ag NPs onto silica core. In this work, silica-core decorated with Ag NPs are synthesized through the chemical reduction method and their morphological and optical properties are characterized using transmission electron microscope (TEM) and UV-Vis-NIR spectrophotometer. The characterization results show the potentials of light absorbing plasmonic metal-dielectric nanoparticles suspended in water for producing steam at high efficiencies upon solar illumination. The experimental work suggests that the vapor generation efficiency can be as high as 63.82% at solar concentrations of 10 suns for the concentration of 0.5 wt% of palsmonic nanofluid.