Publication

Optical selective coating for solar absorbers

Abstract

Solar thermal energy is generally accepted as very energy efficient in providing space heating and cooling, desalination of sea water or solar thermal electricity generation. For all these applications, one of the key elements is the optical selective coating for solar absorbers. The process that we developed to produce such multilayered coating for solar thermal absorbers is sol-gel dip-coating; this chrome-free and low-cost process works at atmospheric pressure and temperature. The optical properties of the thin films have been characterized by spectrophotometry and ellipsometry. Coatings deposited on stainless steel substrate exhibit more than 94% of solar absorptance and 11% of thermal emittance at 100°C. These results are particularly interesting since the samples show a very promising durability.

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Related concepts (32)
Solar thermal collector
A solar thermal collector collects heat by absorbing sunlight. The term "solar collector" commonly refers to a device for solar hot water heating, but may refer to large power generating installations such as solar parabolic troughs and solar towers or non water heating devices such as solar cooker, solar air heaters. Solar thermal collectors are either non-concentrating or concentrating. In non-concentrating collectors, the aperture area (i.e., the area that receives the solar radiation) is roughly the same as the absorber area (i.
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