Comparison of selective transmitters for solar thermal applications.

Solar thermal collectors are radiative heat exchangers. Their efficacy is dictated predominantly by their absorption of short wavelength solar radiation and, importantly, by their emission of long wavelength thermal radiation. In conventional collector designs, the receiver is coated with a selectively absorbing surface (Black Chrome, TiNO, etc.

Plasmonic "pump-probe" method to study semi-transparent nanofluids.

Nanofluids have been increasingly used in a wide range of thermal applications. Although these applications can benefit greatly from investigating the behavior of nanoparticles under different heating scenarios, there is a lack of experiments that can achieve this. To overcome this challenge, an optical "pump-probe"-type experiment is suggested in this paper.