Using sunlight to the max

said braka 4:17 AM
Renyuan Li, a Ph.D. student at KAUST, has investigated
a MXene in which titanium and carbon combine with the formula Ti3C2. "This is a very exciting material," said Associate Professor Peng Wang, Li's supervisor at the KAUST Water Desalination and Reuse Center.






                                                                           
Wang explains his excitement comes from their finding that Ti3C2 can trap the energy of sunlight to purify water by evaporation with an  that is "state of the art." He says this clearly justifies more research toward practical applications.
Other researchers had explored the ability of MXenes to act as electromagnetic shielding  due to their ability to absorb wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation beyond the visible range. So the KAUST discovery began with a simple question. "We decided to investigate, what is the interaction with this MXene and sunlight?" Wang explained. With his group's focus on desalination technology, using the sun's energy to convert water into steam was an obvious target.
The KAUST team's first observation was that Ti3C2 converts the energy of sunlight to heat with 100% efficiency. Also important, however, was that the sophisticated system developed during this research to measure light-to-heat conversion showed that various other materials, including carbon nanotubes and graphene, also achieved almost perfectly efficient conversion. 
"I suggest the focus of the field should now move away from finding new photothermal materials toward finding applications for the many perfect ones we now have," said Wang.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-sunlight-max.html#jCp