Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact
Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact
How To Build a Solar Generator
Affordable solar power using auto parts could make this electricity source far more available.
—
Interesting ideas. Wish for more detail but that seems the norm.
Update — Steve mentioned the auto tracker thing in a comment on this post and rather than bury this info in a comment here it is…
The easiest auto tracker I know of is a power steering assist cylinder with 2 12 oz freon cans attached on either side of a metal plate and attached to the hub of the device needing to follow the sun.
The cylinder is hooked to the control arm of the device and each side charged to balance the unit with both cans covered.
Each can is attached to one of the lines on the cylinder so that when one is in the sun the pressure is higher than the one in the shade and the unit moves to keep them both equally shaded/in the sun.
Quite elegant actually. One moving part and that is the piston.
Any low boiling temp gas should work as long as it doesn’t eat the rubber in the seals or lines. Propane should be safe and is easier and cheaper than freon r 12 to obtain and nowhere near as bad for the ozone, just highly flammable. Will have to try it and see.
Themocracy
Of course, these being parabolic collectors, they will have to track the sun to be really efficient. In a third world environment, that is no problem-get one of the kids to keep it on target. And I guess if you are building one in America, you wouldn’t have much problem scrounging up the parts for an auto-tracker pretty cheaply/easily, either. I know YOU wouldn’t, Dave. I remember TMEN had one in one of their mags about 10 or 15 years ago that used refrigerant to move a pnuematic cylinder to keep something like this automatically centered. I’m sure there are a number of ways….
That’s JUST what I had in mind from the TMEN article-simple, and relatively foolproof. Propane would work fine, and would be MUCH cheaper than R-12. Propane is an excellent refrigerant, it’s just kinda flammable, ya know? One of the things I DON’T miss about working on auto air conditioning is wondering who might have put some type of hydrocarbon refrigerant into someone’s system somewhere down the line….LOTS of ways for that to go bad. One of the MANY boneheaded things the EPA did was approve propane for use as a refrigerant in petro processing plants, thus opening the door for scammers to sell it as “an EPA approved refrigerant!” My ass-if it’s in a refinery where EVERYTHING is flammable, what difference does it make if the refrigerant is explosive, too? Not the case in an automobile, and NOT what it was approved for….just goes to show, any asshole/idiot can screw up anything in the name of making a buck…