Engineers are cooking up a new clean energy solution: charging up crystals with solar energy to temperatures of 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), potentially making them a greener substitute for the carbon-intensive processes that smelt steel and cook cement.
The new technology—described in a proof-of-concept study published today in Device—makes use of a property of quartz that allows it to trap sunlight. Attaching a rod of synthetic quartz to a silicon disk used to absorb energy, the team tested whether the apparatus could retain heat. They blasted it with energy equivalent to sunlight from 136 Suns; the rod warmed to about 1,112 degrees F (600 degrees C) but the absorber plate reached a temperature of 1,922 degrees F (1,050 degrees C).
“People tend to only think about electricity as energy, but in fact, about half of the energy is used in the form of heat,” said Emiliano…
