I have a 2.5m solar oven and it's brilliant. It can boil a litre of water in a minute or so on a sunny day.
The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
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Re: The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
#12See also this godzilla of solar plants :) http://www.fastcoexist.com/3057288/this-huge-new-solar-farm-...
>By 2020, China plans to build 10 more—the equivalent of 100 solar farms the size of Crescent Dunes. The ability of china to scale never ceases to amaze me.
One of the upsides of not being a democracy is that NIMBY, environmentalism and health&safety can be pushed much further down on your list of concerns/priorities.
Re: The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
#13I like this. Imagine if you took something like this to the desert, you could have the means to convert sand into silicon without needing to use a locally-sourced fuel to generate the required heat (For what it's worth, I realise the sand that goes into silicon wafer production usually has to be purer than commonly-found sand, but I still think this production method may prove useful, perhaps for the silicon that goe…
you would still need carbon for reducing the silicon dioxide into silicon
Burn magnesium in carbon dioxyde captured from the air then electrolyse the magnesium oxyde to get useable magnesium back?
Re: The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
#14I like this. Imagine if you took something like this to the desert, you could have the means to convert sand into silicon without needing to use a locally-sourced fuel to generate the required heat (For what it's worth, I realise the sand that goes into silicon wafer production usually has to be purer than commonly-found sand, but I still think this production method may prove useful, perhaps for the silicon that goe…
Solar panel silicon purity is above 99.98%, and often significantly closer to 100%.
Here's a study on "how impure silicon can we use for solar panels", and they only go up to 100 ppm feedstock impurity:
https://www.ecn.nl/news/item/how-silicon-purity-affects-the-...
Edit: should be "above 99.998%".
Re: The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
#15If you're blocking ads for privacy / security reasons this site doesn't load at all: http://i.imgur.com/lWxMl7B.jpg while you see this on some sites with paywalls etc... I've never seen a site _this_ broken.
Works fine with uBlock (OS X latest, Firefox latest)
Re: The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
#16The Mt Louis Solar oven has been used for quite a few interesting projects, one of the most interesting that I recall was the disposal of certain extremely toxic chemicals at very high temperatures.
I built a 10' parabolic concentrator out of an old K-band satellite dish by laminating it with mylar and that - even though quite small - was the scariest thing I ever built.
It's only a few square meters but in full sun and with the focal point about 2-2.5 square centimeters you had to be extremely careful.
Re: The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
#17See also this godzilla of solar plants :) http://www.fastcoexist.com/3057288/this-huge-new-solar-farm-...
One wonder if wind power could be used to melt salt in a similar fashion, to stabilize the output.
Re: The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
#18I'd be interested in the health and safety of working around these systems. It feels like the sort of thing it would be very easy to forget the danger of as there's minimal moving parts and no scary sounds. Surprised a henchman hasn't been thrown into the danger area in a James Bond film yet.
Well there have been issues with flash fried birds at a recently built solar plant. And i think they also have a incident where the mirrors got misaligned and set the collection tower on fire.
That said i think you would feel the heat radiating from the thing, as no mirror is perfectly reflective.
Re: The Godzilla of Solar Ovens
#19If you're blocking ads for privacy / security reasons this site doesn't load at all: http://i.imgur.com/lWxMl7B.jpg while you see this on some sites with paywalls etc... I've never seen a site _this_ broken.
Try the "Continue to site ->"-link in the upper right corner.