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A frozen window could be a perfect challenge for MIT’s new heat storing material, a transparent polymer film that can release heat triggered by certain stimuli
MIT team breaks the ice with new heat storing material developed based on a simple and scalable method. Harnessing the heat of the sun may prove rather challenging at times due to weather conditions. What if heat could be stored by a material which then releases the energy triggered by simple stimuli?
That is the question that backed the MIT team’s research. With the new heat storing material a wide array of applications could soon ensue. Think clothing items that could store heat and release it afterwards just when you need it most. Or the walls of your house blanketed in this type of heat storing material that could release the energy to maintain a cosy temperature and bring costs to a minimum.
The sun provides us with an inexhaustible source of energy to power all types of applications. Solar panels are the most commonly used means to harness solar energy. However, during nighttime or cloudy days, capturing solar energy becomes a nuisance. As such, the MIT team thought of a more stable and simple way to store and release the sun’s energy. The method involves chemical reactions and is fairly simple. The article published in the Advanced Energy Materials journal explains how the MIT team breaks the ice with new heat storing material.
The newly developed material is a transparent polymer film. The polymer film can capture solar energy only to release it at a later time triggered by different stimuli.
The key to the team’s ice-breaking findings are molecules with two different configurations. Both configurations keep the molecules stable. These molecules are known as azobenzenes. When the transparent polymer film is exposed to sunlight, the molecules become charged with solar energy. This configuration can be stably maintained for a prolonged period of time.
However, a number of stimuli triggers the shift to a different configuration. When the solar energy charged molecules are exposed to a specific temperature for instance, they return to their original configuration. In the process, the azobenzenes molecules also release heat.
The team’s findings suggested that the transparent polymer film based on the azobenzenes molecules can release heat burst which reach up to 10 degrees Celsius above the environmental temperature.
During tests, the heat storing material was used on the windshield of a car. Basically, when the transparent polymer film was exposed to a certain temperature is released heat which melted a thin layer of ice. This caused the rest of the ice to simply fall down from the rest of the windshield.
The ice-breaking heat storing material could prove to be the best insulation material up to date. While insulation materials keep heat for a while, this will inevitably dissipate. With the transparent polymer film come a number of benefits.
Firstly, it can be used to ‘coat’ a number of items as it is transparent. And second, it is certain that it will not let heat dissipate as it stores it and releases it only when certain conditions are met.
Photo Credits: Flickr
This is interesting!
Sarcasm – After developing heat releasing technology to a high level, people combusted to death from an unexpected overload. This was easily proven because of fast forensic evidence. Similarly and opposite, harm to life was not proven so quickly when it was realized that cancer could be spread through ways not previously widely known in 2006:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228048/
and again in 2015: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/12/23/1519691113 ,
yet immunizations grown in the most aggressive cancer cells ever found (the immortal stain of Henrietta Lacks was not rethought on the basis that it was easier to blame something else for the all the cancer spreading. Parents were not told that some of the shots had the minimal lethal dose and that if the anti-toxin level was incorrect that their children would die.
It was too hard for the warm cozy clothes to make a market impact due to people seeing others burn up in an instant, but the widespread death and destruction of life continued because the understanding that life is most important in life (the most important truth in life), was not accepted by one of more people somewhere along the way and technology was not throughly vetted and tested for aspirations of money with the disregard of the general good for what is most important of all to us: life itself.
MIT does some amazing stuff. Soon everyone still alive will have the potential power to cause great harm accidentally and intentionally (even if misplaced)