National chemical solar container materials

Which materials are suitable for selective solar thermal applications?

Catalyst design

Which container geometries encapsulate PCMS?

PCMs are encapsulated primarily in shell-and-tube, cylindrical, triplex-tube, spherical, rectangular, and trapezoidal containers. This review focuses on PCM's melting and solidification in different container geometries and their orientations for heat storage in solar thermal systems.

Are PCM container designs practical for solar thermal storage?

PCM container geometry and orientations are practical passive heat transfer enhancement techniques in the long-term compared to adding nanoparticles and attaching fins. This review focuses on significant aspects of PCM container designs for practical solar thermal storage.

Which materials are suitable for selective solar thermal applications?

A proper combination of container geometry, orientation, fins, nanoparticles, metal foams, and heat pipes could be considered for further research. The hybridization of sensible and latent heat storage materials could be investigated to suit the selective solar thermal applications.

Is chemical storage a viable option for solar energy harvesting?

Although this is not straightforward or inexpensive, any solar-energy harvesting facility will experience similar challenges and chemical storage solutions are well developed with minimal resource requirements or storage efficiency losses compared with equivalent technologies (such as batteries).

Which high-temperature container materials are able to resist molten salts?

The high-temperature container materials that are able to resist the aggressive chemical behavior of the molten salts used in NGNP are basically high-temperature alloys (some stainless steels, Inconel, and Hastelloy-N), graphite, and ceramics (Williams 2006).

Can silicon materials be used for solar-to-chemical conversion?

Recent advances in photoelectrochemical applications of silicon materials for solar-to-chemicals conversion. ChemSusChem 10, 4324–4341 (2017). Pornrungroj, C., Andrei, V. & Reisner, E. Thermoelectric–photoelectrochemical water splitting under concentrated solar irradiation. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 145, 13709–13714 (2023).