HIGH PERFORMANCE SOLAR SELECTIVE COATINGS SYSTEM FOR CENCENTRATING SOLAR POWER, BASED ON CARBON NANOTUBES AS OPTICAL COMPONENTS AND GRAPHENE NANO-SHEETS AS METAL OXIDATION INHIBITORS

The widest Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology today is the line focusing, mainly Parabolic trough and the Linear Fresnel . Both technologies use Solar Selective Coating (SSC) for their collectors, which consist of costly and complex PVD method and uses evacuated systems for overall efficiency and preventing the SSC degradation. A novel non-evacuated collector system, coated with environmentally inert SSC can be interesting for dramatically reducing the costs, this can be achieved via formulating SSC dispersions with functional nanomaterials, and tailoring the formulation’s physicho-chemical properties to form Air- sprayable coating, such coating can be also use for on-site repair.

Here we report development of thin film concept, based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as optical component and Graphene Nano Sheets (GNS ) for collector oxidation protection properties , composing of both exhibited outstanding properties to serve as High performance Coating (HPC) for CSP .The coating films were evaluated for optical, mechanical and thermal properties and for corrosion/oxidation inhibition of the underneath metal collector .