Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Reprapable Solar Power

We've discussed reprapping solar panels for a long time, and - of course - our semi-conductor printing capability isn't quite up to that yet.

But it should be possible to reprap a small-scale solar array like a miniature version of the industrial one at Daggett above.

It would use reprapable solar-powered steerable mirrors. Those would be an autonomous motorized gimbal mirror support with a tracker that keeps the sun's reflection pointing the same way at all times (onto a solar boiler, say). The idea is you'd reprap out a load of these, then walk round a field putting them down. They'd all align themselves and start delivering solar power...

I think the trick is to black out a corner of the mirror except for a small circular spot in the middle of the black. Each steerable mirror has a detector on a flexible arm that you place where you want the reflection of that spot to be. Feedback keeps the spot-reflection on station, and hence the main mirror also on station. A really clever design would combine the spot detector with the local solar cell that provides the motor and controller power.

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