Patent Issued on "Localized Solar Collectors"

Patent Issued on "Localized Solar Collectors"

Event Date: October 4, 2016
Solar Sponge
Professor Marconnet and colleagues from MIT received a patent based off her work on localized heating structures based on carbon foams for enhanced evaporation of water in solar collecting systems.

This work was also published in Nature Communications: "Solar Steam Generation by Heat Localization" by Hadi Ghasemi, George Ni, Amy Marconnet, James Loomis, Selcuk Yerci, Nenad Miljkovic, and Gang Chen. The article discusses the development of a carbon-based structure (figure to right) to generate steam with low optical concentration and high optical-to-thermal efficiency. This new structure provides a novel approach to harvesting solar energy for a broad range of phase-change applications.

For more information see:

Patent: http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=9459024  and   http://technology.mit.edu/technologies/16537_localized-solar-collectors

Nature Communications Article: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5449

This work was also featured in several online sources including a Popular Science Article, Scientific American Podcast, and MIT News.