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Build your own Solar Power Concentrator
With solar panels in a satellite dish, our objective is to design, build and test them. We will record our progress in this blog and document our process in a Solar Power Concentrator instruction manual. We plan on making a Solar Power Concentrator modules, Thermal Control modules and Position Control units that have been tested, verified and available for purchase. All of the other parts required should be available locally from your neighbors or a hardware store. The cost of this Solar Power Concentrator should be much less than a conventional solar collector to generate the equivalent amount of electricity.
We have obtained an old satellite dish that has a diameter of 9 feet. We will modify this dish to reflect the sun’s power back to the focal point and to have the dish track the sun from morning till night so the solar panel will always be directed to receive the maximum power. We plan to place a circular solar panel made up of 28 solar cells with a diameter of either 10 or 14 inches in the center of this dish near the focal point. My calculations say that we can get a 100 to 1 or 50 to 1 concentration of solar power depending on the diameter of the collector.
We will document our progress on this blog and generate an instruction manual on how to build a Solar Power Concentrator. We will update this blog at least once a month and send out a news letter monthly so that you can get the latest updates to the instruction manual and progress reports. The Solar Power Concentrator instruction manual is available at no cost to those who sign up for our monthly news letter.
In the past I have designed, and a colleague and I built and tested 6 hydrogen based fuel cell over a years time. We developed very good skills in soldering large copper strips 2.5 inches wide by 36 inches long with channels for hydrogen and air flow. We found that the power losses were too high during testing. Power is a function of resistance times the current squared. Even though we had the resistance down to 0.007 ohms, the current of 50 amps squared was 50 X 50 X 0.007 = 17.5 watts. This loss was too large and made this fuel cell design unfeasible.
