General and scalable fabrication of plasmonic solar selective absorbers by electrodeposition

Abstract

Spectrally selective and thermally stable solar absorber attracts lot of attention in solar desalination and other solar thermal applications. Fabricating stable solar selective absorbers (SSAs), in general, and scalability remain a challenge in solar thermal applications. Here, a simple, general, and scalable electrodeposition strategy is demonstrated to fabricate high-performance plasmonic solar selective absorbers, which can generate different metal element (such as Ni, Co, CoNi, and FeCoNi) SSAs on various shape substrates to suit different requirements in solar thermal applications. Taking metal Ni as an example, average solar absorptance αsolar = 0.90 and thermal emittance εIR = 0.08 at 100 °C can be achieved by optimizing the deposition parameters, resulting in a solar thermal conversion efficiency of ηst = 0.82. This plasmonic SSA maintains good stability at 200 °C in the air and 400 °C in the vacuum, respectively. This simple, general, and scalable strategy can be a potential method to fabricate different plasmonic SSAs in solar thermal applications.