A 459 foot tall power boiler tower, one of three, glows bright from an array of mirrors, below, that focus reflected sunlight on to it.

In a potential breakthrough for the solar energy industry, a San Diego-based research team has developed a light-trapping paint that can endure intense heat for years.

The nano-particle material can withstand outdoor temperatures of 750 degrees Celsius (1,380 Fahrenheit) for extended periods without cracking or peeling. The discovery could improve the economic performance of thermal solar towers, which gather heat energy by concentrating sunlight reflected off thousands of optical mirrors.

The paint was developed by a research team at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and described in two articles in the journal Nano Energy.

Inside solar towers, steam or molten salt is heated to extreme temperatures to help propel steam turbines and generate electricity. Peeling paint can reduce efficiencies and prompt costly days-long maintenance outages.

To drive down the cost of thermal solar energy, engineers also are striving to run solar towers at higher operating temperatures and conserve that heat to produce power after sundown.

"Instead of 550 Celsium, they want to operated this at 750 Celsius," said Sungho Jin, a Jacobs School professor expert in mechanical and aerospace engineering. "And at 750 degrees, things can get red hot. ... We came up system compositions and a structure which makes the materials stable."

Those higher temperatures can translate into a 30 percent improvement in solar efficiencies, Jin explained.

The new material utilizes tiny particles of many sizes ranging from 10 nanometers to 10 micrometers. It absorbs about 90 percent of approaching sunlight. Engineers nicknamed the paint color "black hole."

The project was funded by the Department of Enegy's Sunshot Initiative for accelerating solar-energy technologies.

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1,300 degrees? No sweat for solar paint