MIT students this week successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world, as shown on this clip from LiveScience.com (with my apologies for the annoying ads.)
LiveScience.com gives the following details:
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.
To test the prototype this week, MIT mechanical engineering Spencer Ahrens put a plank of wood in the beam an generated an almost instant puff of smoke.
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."
However, among the comments on this article there's this:
red2erni wrote:
Not quite up to what I expect from MIT. Also when you report that something is patented, like aspects of this contraption, you should tell the truth. It takes years for a patent to be granted these days and I doubt that there is anything here without a ton of prior art. At best there is a patent application or a provisional application. You should respect the USPTO for what it is and actually does (or does not do which is the majority case).
Now for the jelly filling; not so great a revolution here! They got the simple part ok, but not the durable part. The parabolic dishes they are up against are 20 year or more durable. Check out
% reflectivity after 20-30 years in the desert. The aluminum sheet metal here isn't a good mirror even when new and wouldn't stand up one year. Also, what could a bunch of bright kids think they are going to do with that steamm hose on the ground? At least I'd expect an improved Sterling engine! But no, of course that would require a ridgid mirror with much better confocal quality that floppy sheet metal.
What I'd really expect from MIT or from a forward looking, informed forum such as this might one day become, is a breakthrough low cost, flexible dielelectric (pure oxide) front surface mirror that could be coated onto milar with no metal in it, 100% reflectivity and a ~ 500 year lifetime. Oh and also have it make parts per million ozone at the mirror surface and clean the dirt off of itself - which has been demonstrated with a phase of titanium oxide which could be the last layer at the surface of the mirror!! Now that technology has several issued real patents and can't get funded. The reason for good, real, new technology not getting funded isn't that oil companies bury it. The real story is much more interesting and should be what is reported on Yahoo if anyone in the media had half a brain.
red2erni
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