Duplicatting the Sun

No, it will not duplicate the Son in your house. It might burn him, though.

Actually, if you're trying to duplicate the Son then the Father and the Holy Ghost may have issues with you.

--
www.wescottdesign.com

The ignorant jokers had a good time . They can place the replies where the Sun doesn't shine.

I can communicate in 4 different languages , what about you?

John

We thought you were a bit slow.

tm

I don't think it's practical to focus the dish on a small area without risking fire. It's just not done. There is however a large installed base of light tubes, the most common being simply metal tubes with mirror polished interior surfaces

. Use the dish to make hot water instead.

Not to mention the Mother.

And no, it's probably not a good idea to concentrate sunlight into a house. There are off-the-shelf skylights that light up a room quite well, when the sun's out. On the north side, a flat reflector should be more than enough.

The Sun is quite bright, you know.

Good Luck! Rich

Without wishing to detract from the lovely flame war you seem to have started, there's a physical principle called the conservation of radiance that governs this sort of thing. (It's deducible from Maxwell's equations, so it isn't a separate principle on its own like universal gravitation, but it's widely useful in helping prevent folks from trying recreational impossibilities unintentionally.)

Radiance is light intensity in watts per square meter per steradian, which corresponds roughly to the subjective concept of the brightness of an image. We know by experience that when something gets further away, it looks the same brightness, only smaller.

For instance, a star in the night sky has about the same radiance as the Sun, but since it appears so very small (about 250,000 times smaller in angular diameter), it doesn't give us much light. However, if there were a very large number of stars similar to Alpha Centauri, so that they occupied the same fraction of the sky as the Sun, they'd be about equally bright and hot as well. (Alpha Centauri is a bit hotter than the Sun, so the comparison isn't exact, but you get the idea.)

If you could form an image of the Sun such that the light came in from all directions equally, and none was lost in the process, then an object placed in that image would heat up to the temperature of the surface of the Sun. In real life you don't get all that close.

For instance, AFAIK the world's record for a concentrator solar photovoltaic device is held by my friend Ted van Kessel of IBM, and it's about 2500 suns, i.e. the Sun magnified so that it covers the equivalent of about 1.2% of the sky. (*)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(*) angular radius of the Sun = 0.25 degrees = 4.4 mrad, Solid angle of the Sun = pi*(4.4 mrad)**2 = 6E-5 steradians Solid angle of a sphere = 4*pi

=> 2500 suns = (0.15 steradians)/(12.5 steradians) = 0.012 of a sphere

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

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ere

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i take it canned lights won't do because they're an energy sink?

Now that I have attracted the attention of the smart people of the group, let me give you details of my small projects.

I have a large living room with 10 feet plants located at the corners. Those plants like to have sunlight. Since I have access to the sunlight I designed a platform supporting 10 flat mirrors of 4feef by

6 inches installed by a sunny window facing South. The panel could be moved vertically and the mirrors could be moved horizontally but in a synchronous movement. I learned that if more than one mirror illuminate the same area the consequences could be disastrous. I have burned a plant but projecting the light on the white ceiling gave the amazing look of having the room on the outside.

I am some what of a fanatic on the energy field. So much that I am at the present biding on a roof of a 10 floor building in a very sunny country. I am offering $140k for the exclusive use of the roof and if accepted will support a penthouse, as many solar panels I can on the available space , rain water collection etc. The central room will have a large sky light and I am considering the installation of mirrors on the inside walls of that box in order to increase the light on the referred room . Also being considered is the use of the pipe rails of a large veranda to heat the water and since the temperature never goes below 5 degrees C there is no need for antifreeze but some rust inhibitor is a must.

Very grateful for the pass and future help

John Taylor

it

Do you also spell phonetically in the other three?

,

here

So put them outside.

Yeah, that'll conserve energy. How much oil was needed to manufacture those items?

Who's doing the moving? The aforementionned "son"?

A pass? Like in football?

--
They already have, apparently, and from your reply seem to have caused
your hemorrhoids to flare up.

In all fairness, you asked for "even the nasty ones" to reply, but
when you received replies poking fun at you, you got your knickers all
in a bunch.

--
Indoor Marijuana cultivation?

This Taylor guy must already have a history... my filters snagged him.

From your discussion above, it appears we have yet another Slowman-Larkin emulator on our hands... snotty ignorant. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Maybe a better way to say thank you would be "thank you".

If you have that much money to throw at the problem you should have said so. Offer a few $k and then you'll get lots of serious help.

I can offer one free suggestion though. Where you focus light on the end of the light pipe, have the end of the pipe extend some distance from the house in any direction. That way if the assembly shifts and the light misses the pipe, it will be out of focus where it hits the house, and hence won't set it on fire. If the focal point is halfway between the reflector and the house then the radiation at the house should be the same as at the reflector, so will be no worse than exposure to direct sunlight.

--
Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

No, this would not work as a kind of Star Trek replicator for your Son.

He asked for it. He got it. :-p

Typically, high energy solar setups for this type of light gathering or concentration, etc. only follows a very low number of bends. The fewer the better. ("replicating the Sun"). But for general room lighting, it would be easy to gather enough with some fiber bundles and light shafts.

They have far more serious uses for it now though.

Modern solar thermoelectric generators are a field of mirrors which all reflect upward to a mirror at the top of a tower, where it gets reflected down the tower shaft to the base (or further), to heat a mass of liquefied Sodium which is used to make steam and turn steam turbine driven electrical power generator sets for huge, multi-megawatt outputs.

Long before this was a reality, say back in the early to mid sixties, there was an early version of such a tower and the mirror array down in the base focused the beam onto a 6 inch thick steel plate, and proceeded to punch an 8 inch hole through it like a laser would (probably not as fast).

But that was the predecessor to what is currently in use in the Southwest to make power as described above. There are also fields of mirrors the track the sun which reflect directly onto Sodium filled heat pipe right there on the mirror, so it had a far shorter focal length than the tower pointed arrays. These mirrors looked curled. Those systems do not perform as well (per acre maybe?) as the tower pointed variety. The Sodium get a more direct (more efficient in the final analysis) solar heat infusion, I guess.

Apparently it works a treat:

--Winston

Deep underground.