Sandia’s concentrating solar quarterly seminar addresses challenges associated with surfaces at high temperatures

Sandia National Laboratories’ Concentrating Solar Power Program will present its third quarterly concentrating solar seminar, “Textured Surfaces for Applications in Concentrating Solar Power,” on June 23, 2022, from 8:30 a.m. – 9:15 a.m. MDT.

Professor Ranga Pitchumani, of the Advanced Materials and Technologies Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, will discuss the challenges associated with operating target receiver and heat transfer fluid temperatures at high temperatures (750° C or more), including the lack of viable air-stable absorber coatings with high thermal efficiency and the high corrosion of containment materials in contact with molten salts used as heat transfer fluid and thermal energy storage medium.

His presentation will demonstrate fractal, multiscale textured surfaces that address both of these challenges:

• Solar selective surfaces with multiscale fractal nano- to micro-structures yield solar absorptance of 0.984 and absorber efficiency over 95.5% at high temperature. The surfaces exhibit superior environmental and thermal endurance, and air-stability.
• Textured coatings on ferrous alloys are shown to reduce corrosion in different molten salts compared to uncoated surfaces at temperatures up to 750° C. Corrosion of the coated surfaces of ferrous alloys is shown to be less than that of the higher cost, high Ni content Ha230, which provides opportunities for low-cost structural materials to be corrosion-resistant to molten salt heat transfer fluids and storage media in high-temperature CSP applications.

Margaret Gordon, Manager of the NSTTF and Concentrating Solar Technologies, will host the seminar. Sandians are welcome to attend in person at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility (9981/146) and the general public may attend via Teams.

Learn more at Concentrating Solar Power.