The efficiency of generating electricity from heat using concentrated solar power plants (which use mirrors or lenses to concentrate sunlight in order to drive heat engines, usually involving ...turbines) may be appreciably increased by operating with higher turbine inlet temperatures, but this would require improved heat exchanger materials. By operating turbines with inlet temperatures above 1,023 kelvin using closed-cycle high-pressure supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO
) recompression cycles, instead of using conventional (such as subcritical steam Rankine) cycles with inlet temperatures below 823 kelvin
, the relative heat-to-electricity conversion efficiency may be increased by more than 20 per cent. The resulting reduction in the cost of dispatchable electricity from concentrated solar power plants (coupled with thermal energy storage
) would be an important step towards direct competition with fossil-fuel-based plants and a large reduction in greenhouse gas emissions
. However, the inlet temperatures of closed-cycle high-pressure sCO
turbine systems are limited
by the thermomechanical performance of the compact, metal-alloy-based, printed-circuit-type heat exchangers used to transfer heat to sCO
. Here we present a robust composite of ceramic (zirconium carbide, ZrC) and the refractory metal tungsten (W) for use in printed-circuit-type heat exchangers at temperatures above 1,023 kelvin
. This composite has attractive high-temperature thermal, mechanical and chemical properties and can be processed in a cost-effective manner. We fabricated ZrC/W-based heat exchanger plates with tunable channel patterns by the shape-and-size-preserving chemical conversion of porous tungsten carbide plates. The dense ZrC/W-based composites exhibited failure strengths of over 350 megapascals at 1,073 kelvin, and thermal conductivity values two to three times greater than those of iron- or nickel-based alloys at this temperature. Corrosion resistance to sCO
at 1,023 kelvin and 20 megapascals was achieved
by bonding a copper layer to the composite surface and adding 50 parts per million carbon monoxide to sCO
. Techno-economic analyses indicate that ZrC/W-based heat exchangers can strongly outperform nickel-superalloy-based printed-circuit heat exchangers at lower cost.
Antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT) is a promising method for the topical treatment of drug-resistant staphylococcal infections and can be further improved by identifying mechanisms that ...increase the specificity of photosensitizer uptake by bacteria. Here we show that Ga(III)-protoporphyrin IX chloride (Ga-PpIX), a fluorescent hemin analog with previously undisclosed photosensitizing properties, can be taken up within seconds by Staphylococcus aureus including multidrug-resistant strains such as MRSA. The uptake of Ga-PpIX by staphylococci is likely diffusion-limited and is attributed to the expression of high-affinity cell-surface hemin receptors (CSHRs), namely iron-regulated surface determinant (Isd) proteins. A structure–activity study reveals the ionic character of both the heme center and propionyl groups to be important for uptake specificity. Ga-PpIX was evaluated as a photosensitizer against S. aureus and several clinical isolates of MRSA using a visible light source, with antimicrobial activity at 0.03 μM with 10 s of irradiation by a 405 nm diode array (1.4 J/cm2); antimicrobial activity could also be achieved within minutes using a compact fluorescent lightbulb. GaPpIX was not only many times more potent than PpIX, a standard photosensitizer featured in clinical aPDI, but also demonstrated low cytotoxicity against HEK293 cells and human keratinocytes. Ga-PpIX uptake was screened against a diverse panel of bacterial pathogens using a fluorescence-based imaging assay, which revealed rapid uptake by several Gram-positive species known to express CSHRs, suggesting future candidates for targeted aPDT.
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