Nanoparticle-Mediated, Light-Induced Phase Separations

Abstract

Nanoparticles that both absorb and scatter light, when dispersed in a liquid, absorb optical energy and heat a reduced fluid volume due to the combination of multiple scattering and optical absorption. This can induce a localized liquid-vapor phase change within the reduced volume without the requirement of heating the entire fluid. For binary liquid mixtures, this process results in vaporization of the more volatile component of the mixture. When subsequently condensed, these two steps of vaporization and condensation constitute a distillation process mediated by nanoparticles and driven by optical illumination. Because it does not require the heating of a large volume of fluid, this process requires substantially less energy than traditional distillation using thermal sources. We investigated nanoparticle-mediated, light-induced distillation of ethanol-H2O and 1-propanol-H2O mixtures, using Au-SiO2 nanoshells as the absorber-scatterer nanoparticle and nanoparticle-resonant laser irradiation to drive the process. For ethanol-H2O mixtures, the mole fraction of ethanol obtained in the light-induced process is substantially higher than that obtained by conventional thermal distillation, essentially removing the ethanol-H2O azeotrope that limits conventional distillation. In contrast, for 1-propanol-H2O mixtures the distillate properties resulting from light-induced distillation were very similar to those obtained by thermal distillation. In the 1-propanol-H2O system, a nanoparticle-mediated, light-induced liquid-liquid phase separation was also observed.

Morphology Control of Ag Polyhedron Nanoparticles for Cost‐Effective and Fast Solar Steam Generation

“…Most of the previous reports have mainly focused on the roles of the absorption spectrum for solar thermal conversion, and obtained the harvesting solar energy performances through artificial light simulator or laser in the laboratory . The practical running performances and dominant factors of harvesting solar energy for steam generation under the actual sunlight are rarely reported.…”

Promoting Oxygen Evolution Reaction of Co‐Based Catalysts (Co3O4, CoS, CoP, and CoN) through Photothermal Effect

“…Photothermal conversion is one of the main commercialized applications for solar energy harvesting . Photothermal materials directly convert solar light into heat immediately, which have been widely used in water evaporation and cancer therapy . There are two definitive advantages related to the introduction of photothermal effect (PE) into catalytic processes.…”

Steam generation under one sun enabled by a floating structure with thermal concentration

“…[8][9][10][11][12] Plasmonic nanoparticles with absorption and scattering cross-sections exceeding their geometrical cross-sections have been recently developed and applied for direct solar steam generation [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] , but they typically require optical concentration of 10-1000x for steam generation. However, optical concentrators are expensive ($200/m 2 ) 25 , often accounting for a major portion of the capital cost of solar thermal systems.…”