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
Britain's National Grid Drops China-Based Supplier Over Cybersecurity Fears
LONDON - Britain's National Grid has started removing components supplied by a unit of China-backed Nari Technology's from the electricity transmission network over cybersecurity fears.
The decision came in April after the utility sought advice from the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), a branch of the nation's signals intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the newspaper quoted a Whitehall official as saying.
National Grid declined to comment citing "confidential contractual matters." "We take the security of our infrastructure very seriously and have effective controls in place to protect our employees and critical assets to ensure we can continue to reliably, safely and…
