Abstract
An experimental investigation was performed on the solar photo-thermal conversion performance of Au, Ag and Au-Ag blended Nanoparticles (NPs). The experimental results showed that both the temperature and photo-thermal conversion efficiency increased as the Au NP volume fraction increased. However, nanofluids with lower NP volume fractions showed a higher Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) since the photon-absorption of each NP was limited. Plasmonic Au and Ag nanofluids showed a better photo-thermal conversion performance than semiconductor ZnO and TiO2 nanofluids. The photo-thermal conversion efficiency of Au-Ag blended NPs (1.75–0.15ppm) was 30.97%. This is almost equal to the arithmetic sum (30.91%) of the photo-thermal conversion efficiencies of Au NPs (1.75ppm) and Ag NPs (0.15ppm) separately because of the separate absorption of different wavebands by the Au and Ag NPs. Our work provides a promising method for preparing working fluids for solar photo-thermal conversion by mixing different NPs to match the solar spectral intensity instead of increasing the volume fraction of the same NP.
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