Solar Energy

Nice post Somshekhar. According to this i would like to add a tiny info i read couple of days back in a journal. A team of researchers from U.S. and Swiss have developed a prototype solar device that can turn the energy of the sun into fuel. The apparatus uses a quartz window and cavity to concentrate sunlight into a cylinder lined with a metal oxide - cerium oxide, also known as ceria.

Ceria has a natural property of emitting oxygen as it heats up and absorbing it as it cools down. If water or carbon dioxide is pumped into the device while the ceria is cooling down, the ceria will strip the oxygen from them, liberating either hydrogen or carbon monoxide, the researchers say. The hydrogen thus released could be used in fuel cells to run cars or by mixing hydrogen with carbon monoxide to create syngas fuels.

The prototype is very inefficient, harnessing only between 0.7 and 0.8 percent of the solar energy taken into the vessel, but the researchers are hopeful of achieving an efficiency of 19%, enough for a commercially viable device. In a way, this process mimics plant life which also use carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to create energy as part of the process of photosynthesis

Somesekar, very interesting ..... thanks for sharing..... 

Keep sharing....