An interesting innovation that you could build and place in your backyard. M

Solar dish may revolutionize energy production

Solar dish may revolutionize energy production - LiveScience - MSNBC.com



Solar dish may revolutionize energy production
Inventors: Dish is user-friendly, so anybody can build it'

updated 10:56 a.m. PT, Fri., June. 20, 2008
A new type of solar energy collector concentrates the sun into a beam that could melt steel. Researchers say the device could revolutionize global energy production.

The prototype is a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam.

"This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence," said Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish's design — the rights to which he has signed over to a team of students at MIT.
The thing does more than burn wood, of course. At the end of a 12-foot aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it. When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.

Ahrens and his teammates have started a company, RawSolar, to hopefully mass produce the dishes. They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity, according to an MIT statement. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within two years or so with the energy they produce, the students figure.

Wood, the inventor, said the students built the dish and improved on his design.

"They really have simplified this and made it user-friendly, so anybody can build it," he said.

Wood said small dishes work best because it requires much less support structure and costs less for a given amount of collection area.
"I've looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I've seen," said MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class the project first took shape last fall. "And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world."

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Now watch government prohibit people from manufacturing their own or prohibit them from having them without paying the government an ongoing fee.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

What most people do not think about is the feeling of freedom from energy dependencies on huge billionaire corporations. That type of change toward this freedom is considered the most radical by the corporations as you are becoming independent of them. No more monopoly on your energy needs.

I am impressed with this invention because it can almost be called low tech and you can build it yourself.

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Didn't Archimedes invent this 2 thousand years ago.

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Walt Whitman
"I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences."

Maybe the design, but I doubt that he had anything close to the easily accessed materials that we do today. The whole trick to a solar disk is reflecting sunlight by mirrors, lenses and or metallic shiney surfaces to one point. Sometimes Fresnel lenses are used to concentrate sunlight to a single area.

If I had one of these on my property, my bet is that I would fry up all the squirrels and birds that would have to come over and check it out. Kentucky Fried Wildlife?

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Actually he did, and MythBusters (about 1 year ago) did this very thing as a project and made one that could light things on fire. This is nothing new, and I'm sure, that like solar panel bras, it will fade away most quickly.

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Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides

It looks like a satellite dish, which is illegal in my 'hood.