Floating carbon-black-coated paper solar vapor generation

Abstract

Solar vapor generation is a recently developing application in the solar energy harvesting area. Traditionally, bulk liquid is heated to boiling temperature to generate vapor and distilled water. This process suffers from tremendous heat loss by heating bulk liquid which is not necessary. It also requires costly high optical concentration or vacuum accessories when heated by solar energy. In this thesis, the development of a new structure called floating carbon-black-coated paper (CP) is reported. We achieve solar-to-heat conversion efficiency up to 88.6% at normal solar light and 94.8% with 10 times concentration. All material used are low cost commercial products and the heat loss is minimized by localizing converted heat in the surface of water.