Solar to electrical energy conversion system Development: Difference between revisions

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=Goals, purpose and design criteria=
=Goals, purpose and design criteria=
*Convert solar energy to electrical energy.
*Convert solar energy to electrical energy.

Revision as of 23:20, 21 June 2011


Solar to electrical energy conversion system
   Home  |  Research & Development  |  Bill of Materials  |  Manufacturing Instructions  |  User's Manual  |  User Reviews    File:Solar to electrical energy conversion system.png

Goals, purpose and design criteria

  • Convert solar energy to electrical energy.
  • Have an operating and capital cost which is the lowest that we can manage while meeting other design criteria. Current working goal in sight is 1$ per peak watt in capital material costs.
  • We still have to decide exactly how to factor in capital labor costs (e.g. $ per hour equivalent). We still have to decide how we want to factor in running material and labor costs, too, to have uniform values for evaluating expected system costs for various designs.
  • Be designed in accordance with OSE specifications, including lifetime design, environmentally benign, etc.
  • The exact power output and size is not specified because the main performance parameter is the cost per peak watt. (Assuming reasonable efficiency under other than peak insolation conditions - maybe we should be more specific like the kWh gathered in the worst 3 day period of the typical meteorological year for Columbia, Missouri (using TMY3 data) divided by the total system cost (if you are off grid that is how you might size the system, and therefore what determines the capital cost). However it may change relatively little so peak watt is okay and more convenient if less than perfect.

The end use of the system is to part of the electrical power supply for a ~200 person community based around the GVCS, which is part of the OSE specifications. If the cost goals are met it will also be highly useful outside of this context, such as powering an off grid home. The current prototype I is expected to have a peak output in the 3 kW range, which is in the right range for powering a single home with one unit for an efficient home and 2 for a typical one.


-add more-

Current state of progress

As of June 19 2011 the design stage for prototype one is finished and prototyping has begun. It is to combine:

  • a P32 solar concentrator and absorber of the design developed by solarfire.org with an automatic tracking system and other peripherals with,
  • A piston based steam engine developed through the (general purpose) steam engine project.

Completion is expected in the next 6 months or so.


I have gone through the category:Steam engine and category:Steam Engine (capitalization matters), category:Energy and category:Solar_Turbine to retrieve all the documents that are relevant to the current project so others can get up to speed easily without missing anything.

Existing design work

This section and the linked pages contains all existing design documents that have been produced during the design of prototype I as of June 21, 2011. Documents produced after this point should be included elsewhere on this page. I'm excluding blog posts because they are not part of the design process.

More relevant to current efforts:

see also http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Category:Steam_Engine there are too many for me to go through there.

Better wiki management tools or a Wikian team would really help to get things categorized better and keep them categorized.

Documentation on prototyping work so far

The blog posts should be added too as they contain status reporting information and some information about the current approach. Really this should all be in one place.

Less relevant to current efforts:

More relevant to current efforts: See http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Category:Steam_engine for all the documents relating to the current prototyping of the steam engine.

The solar concentrator prototyping specific to this project has not yet started as of june 21, 2011. The P32 solar concentrator system and absorber/steam generator is a finished product of the Solar Fire organization, but we still need to add automatic tracking and mirror cleaning, then combine it with the engine.

Prototype II

It has been suggested by Gregor that we try a community-exploration and design approach for the design of prototype II. This might help to improve the openness and collaboration of the process, and efficiently harness the efforts of more people. Gregor is currently working on getting the groundwork to start with this approach up on the wiki, including this page.


Related pages

See the energy category page for more pages on the project. Remember this project has been going on a long time and many of the pages have little applicability to the current development effort(check the date in the edit history).

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