The sun is an abundant yet underused energy resource. Technologies that allow for the storage and release of that energy will be needed to take advantage of the sun’s in-exhaustible supply. Most efforts toward this goal have focused on storing solar energy and releasing it as electricity.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have taken a different approach and developed a material that stores the sun’s energy in the form of a chemical change and releases it as heat. The development could enable clothing that heats up in cold weather and deicing windshields.
Known as solar thermal fuels (STF), such chemical-based storage materials have been developed before. Those earlier efforts, however, had limited application because the STFs were designed to be used as liquids and could not be made into durable solid films. The new material is the first solid-state material...
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