Anyone seen an AC Solar generator? Thoughts on it?

Nigel Goodwin said:

I was watching "Bang Goes The Theory" last night (similar to Mythbusters), and one of them went to the French solar furnace.

As a demonstration they used an old German serchlight reflector (only 2.5m). and this focused only about 0.5m in front (shown by a water spray). The programme presenter flicked a piece of wood through the focus point, which instantly burst into flames. The French engineer with him said that this small dish will melt anything, and proceeded to melt a large steel bolt, and then a piece of granite!.

It was incredibly impressive!.

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There was a guy who blogged about taking an old (huge) satellite dish, gluing on hundreds of mirrors, and showing off all the things he could burn or melt at the focal point.

I don't know what purpose it served, but it sure was cool.

The energy you can extract comes from the difference in potential energy between the input and output, multiplied by the rate of flow.

In the hydro case, the difference in potential energy comes from the altitude difference between input and output.

Anyway, the question is : why does the water go through the pipe ?

Answering that will tell you why the air will not go through the "wind from the sun" pipe : it is short-circuited. Note that the website has no calculations or anything else to show a beginning of proof for the validity of the design...

Hi, peufeu

Air will pe " pumped " into the Horizontal pipes because the hot climbing air will create a depression in the beveled ends of the horizontal pipes ...

This is well known @ much smaller scale ( ! ) as " flow amplifier " devices based on the " Coanda " effect. ( quantity of movement conservation )

here it is clearly shown ...

https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2010/11/synair-airmover-fr.pdf

**broken link removed**

It was one of my exercises ... when I went to Engineer's school.

And I saw it working ...


But I do admit, it is a bit ... funny ... pushed to those extremes !!! Climbing air will need furious speeds ... to create some usable depression.

Theory tell it is possible !

Alain

peufeu said:

Fatal flaw is : why would the air go through the pipes instead of around the pipes ? If you short-circuit your load, will you get any power in your load ? No.

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Why couldn't the air do both?

Alternatively, since this idea as presented is essentially a man-made heat island, what about arranging the wind turbines at the periphery of the island?

I'll agree that the idea is long on the design and low on the calculations; the idea's out there though for someone to do the calculations (if I had more time, I'd probably try to do them myself). It would still all be fairly theoretical, simply because nobody has purposefully tried to build a "pure" heat island and use its effects for power generation...

I think the idea is at least worth trying as a test case; it should be possible to build a scaled down version (even homebrew, if you have enough land).

This is really?