MIT building low-cost solar concentrator
Led by MIT mechanical engineering graduate student Spencer Ahrens, the team is assembling a 12-foot-square mirrored dish capable of concentrating sunlight by a factor of 1,000. But it's being built from simple, inexpensive industrial materials selected for price, durability and ease of assembly rather than for optimum performance.
Ahrens said the goal is to make a dish that, in mass production, can be competitive in cost with other energy sources and produce heat for space heating and electric power at the same time.
"The technical challenge here is to make it simple," Ahrens said. "We're using all commodity materials that are all in high production."
Ahrens said the dish, in the Sun Belt, could make about 10,000 peak watts of heat and 3,500 peak watts of electricity.
"It's designed for long life - we hope they will last more than 30 years with good maintenance - and for indigenous manufacturing in the developing world with minimal tooling," he said.
Related News
Starved of electricity, Lebanon picks Dubai's ENOC to swap Iraqi fuel
BEIRUT - Lebanon's energy ministry said it had picked Dubai's ENOC in a tender to swap 84,000 tonnes of Iraqi high sulphur fuel oil with 30,000 tonnes of Grade B fuel oil and 33,000 tonnes of gasoil.
ENOC won the tender, part of a deal between the two countries that allows the cash-strapped Lebanese government to pay for 1 million tonnes of Iraqi heavy fuel oil a year in goods and services.
As Lebanon suffers what the World Bank has described as one of the deepest depressions of modern history, shortages of fuel this month have meant state-powered electricity has been available…
