Advancing Energy and Water Technologies via Nanoengineered Materials

Nanoengineered materials have exciting, untapped potential to improve energy and water technologies. In this talk, I provide a few examples of how we leverage nanoscale manipulation capabilities to develop advanced thermal management, solar thermal energy conversion and water harvesting devices. First, I discuss our recent work that harnesses novel surface designs to control and manipulate phase-change processes. Low surface tension condensates pose a unique challenge since they often form a film, even on hydrophobic coatings. Lubricant infused surfaces (LIS) represent a potential solution, where a lubricant immiscible with the low surface tension condensate is infused into a rough structure on the condenser surface to repel the condensate. We used LIS to demonstrate a 5x improvement in heat transfer for low surface tension fluids compared to filmwise condensation and provide detailed designed guidelines for LIS. Next, I discuss how nanoengineered materials can also be used to increase the efficiency of solar thermal devices. In solar thermophotovoltaics, we show that engineering the spectral properties and defining the active area of the emitter with respect to the absorber, we achieve solar-to-electrical conversion efficiencies of 6.8%, exceeding that of the underlying cell. Finally, I discuss a new water harvesting device that takes advantage of the unique properties of metal organic frameworks to address water scarcity challenges in arid climates.

Speaker: Evelyn Wang, MIT