About Solar Furnaces

Solar furnaces are any device, which can harness the sun's rays to produce very high temperatures up to 4,000°C by concentrating the solar radiation through reflectors. A small solar furnace can even be used to cook food without the use of firewood and a large solar furnace can produce electricity by heating a gas.

The heat produced by large solar furnaces can even melt rock, steel, or used to produce hydrogen fuel.

The operation principle of a solar furnace is very simple requiring the use of two mirrors. The mirrors are angled at a focal point, which increased the intensity of sunlight to approximately threefold. The reason for this is the fact that the focal point is the concentrated light from the sun as well as the two mirrors. When you increase the number of mirrors to ten mirrors, then you begin to achieve energy and heat levels where you can actually boil water and cook food. The amount of energy and efficiency of the solar furnace relay on completely on how accurate the mirrors are focused on one point.

A dish-Stirling system is a dish system that employs a large, reflective, parabolic dish that focuses all the sunlight striking it at a single point above the dish. It is at this focus point that a thermal collector is used to collect the solar energy and transform it into useful energy. Dish systems can achieve greater temperatures because of the higher amount of concentrated light they receive. When a dish system is attached to or combined with a Stirling engine, then the system is known as a Dish-Stirling System.

The Stirling engine is an external combustion piston engine. When the solar furnace focus its energy on rock salt, the salt melts and is used to heat water that produces steam that powers the turbine. It is the heat-exchange process that provides near-perfect efficiency in conversion of heat into mechanical movement that allows the dish-system to follow the path of the sun. [1], [2], [3]

Solar furnaces have proven to be more efficient than photovoltaic solar cells because of the amount of energy they are able to produce.

References:

[1] RenewableEnergyAccess.com
[2] Stirling Energy Systems Inc.
[3] World Book Encyclopedia
 

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