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Science Blog ZINC PROJECTS

Inexpensive prototype solar dish passes first tests

Date: 24-Jun-08
Author: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A team led by MIT students successfully tested a prototype of what may be the most cost-efficient solar power system in the world -- one that team members believe has the potential to revolutionize global energy production.

The system consists of a 12-foot-wide [3.7-meter] mirrored dish that team members have spent the last several weeks assembling. The dish, made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror, concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 -- creating heat so intense it could melt a bar of steel.

Attached to the end of a 12-foot-long 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.

Inventor Doug Wood demonstrates the solar dish's power by using it to set fire to a board held at the focal point. Courtesy: David Chandler, MIT

Someday soon such dishes by the thousands 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. Once in mass production, such arrays should pay for themselves within a couple of years with the energy they produce.

Full story: MIT prototype solar dish passes first tests