Scientists have engineered a water-soluble pyrimidone molecule that captures solar heat and releases it days or weeks later—enough to boil water on demand.
It’s pretty neat though. It stays liquid the whole time. So you could circulate it to charge it up, somewhere other than where you want to extract the energy. But it looks like it charges from 300nm light (UV) so depending on its absorption bandwidth usefulness is questionable.
It’s pretty neat though. It stays liquid the whole time. So you could circulate it to charge it up, somewhere other than where you want to extract the energy. But it looks like it charges from 300nm light (UV) so depending on its absorption bandwidth usefulness is questionable.
There’s plenty of sunlight energy at 300nm, even if most of it is in the visible spectrum.
it’s transparent too so you can just put pv panel underneath to capture the rest
I suspect it’s sensitive to only a narrow band of frequencies, akin to the molecule’s resonance frequency, but idk
there is a problem that it can heat itself up so hard during decomposition that it can just go on without catalyst