A Scalable Dealloying Technique to Create Thermally Stable Plasmonic Nickel Selective Solar Absorbers

The single-element-based selective solar absorber (SSA) is attractive as it does not suffer from mismatched thermal expansion and consequent performance degradation in composite selective solar absorbers. In this report, a simple and scalable dealloying method is demonstrated for fabricating SSAs with high durability. The porous nickel SSAs prepared through this technique not only exhibit an applicable solar absorptance/thermal emittance (0.93/0.12 or 0.88/0.08) without the aid of antireflection coatings but also show an excellent thermal stability up to 200 °C in air over prolonged periods. Furthermore, the dealloying technique shows great tunable performance for the selective absorption of metal absorber, which can be used to fabricate the porous metallic structures for various working conditions.