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Heat at intermediate temperatures (120-220 °C) is in significant demand in both industrial and domestic sectors for applications such as water and space heating, steam generation, sterilization, and other industrial processes. Harnessing heat from solar energy at these temperatures, however, requires costly optical and mechanical components to concentrate the dilute solar flux and suppress heat losses. Thus, achieving high temperatures under unconcentrated sunlight remains a technological challenge as well as an opportunity for utilizing solar thermal energy. In this work, we demonstrate a solar receiver capable of reaching over 265 °C under ambient conditions without optical concentration. The high temperatures are achieved by leveraging an artificial greenhouse effect within an optimized monolithic silica aerogel to reduce heat losses while maintaining high solar transparency. This study demonstrates a viable path to promote cost-effective solar thermal energy at intermediate temperatures.

A dense array of parallel single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) as the device channel can carry higher current, be more robust, and have smaller device-to-device variation, thus is more desirable for and compatible with applications in future highly integrated circuits when compared with single-tube devices. The density of the parallel SWNT arrays and the diameter of SWNTs both are key factors in the determination of the device performance. In this paper, we present a new multiple-cycle chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method to synthesize horizontally aligned arrays of SWNTs with densities of 20-40 SWNT/μm over large area and a diameter distribution of 2.4 ± 0.5 nm on the quartz surface based on a methanol/ethanol CVD method. The high nucleation efficiency of catalyst particles in multiple-cycle CVD processes has been demonstrated to be the main reason for the improvements in the density of SWNT arrays. More interestingly, we confirmed the existence of an etching effect, which strongly affects the final products in the multiple-cycle growth. This etching effect is likely the reason that only large-diameter SWNTs were obtained in the multiple-cycle CVD growth. Using these high-density and large-diameter nanotube arrays, two-terminal devices with back-gates were fabricated. The performances of these devices have been greatly improved in overall resistance and on-state current, which indicates these SWNT arrays have high potential for applications such as interconnects, high-frequency devices, and high-current transistors in future micro- or nanoelectronics.

Purification of high-quality few-walled carbon nanotubes (fWNTs) was developed by slow but selective oxidation in hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)) at room temperature. The purity, nanotubes' structure, and thermal stability of purified fWNTs were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Raman spectroscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), respectively. The results showed that fWNTs could be selectively purified by prolonging the stirring time in 30 wt % H(2)O(2) solution. Highly purified fWNTs were obtained, having a high G/D ratio in Raman spectra and good thermal stability indicating the good quality of the purified fWNTs. The approach provides a simple low cost method for purification that also has higher nanotube yield than other purification methods.