Solar One; Thinking Ahead

      Using those things that I have learned over the years I designed my ideas around a few possibilities.  First of all some of these mirrors are bound to drift off the target area of 3 inches square.  This hot box receiver is 6 inches square with a Plexiglas window of ¼ of an inch thick.  Here is my reasoning.  The way a car heats up in the summer sun is from the solar spectrum of wavelengths in the shortwave part of it and that can penetrate the glass windows.  Once it penetrates the windshield something miraculous happens.  It changes frequencies and becomes a much longer wavelength radiation.  In so doing, since you cannot destroy energy, it gives up a lot of heat making this change which then becomes trapped inside of the car.  To a great degree it becomes trapped because this much longer wavelength cannot exit through the same way it came in, but there would be some losses due to convection, conduction and radiation otherwise the inside temperatures of a car would never cool off at night.  J  Logic I think.  Now the real brain power here is from those reading these reports and I am depending upon all of you to keep me on the straight and narrow.  I don’t have time to get my engineering degree.  So the Plexiglas will serve a couple of purposes.  First of all, it will act as a shield against cooling breezes from the local air currents around the Solar One.  Secondly, it will or should act as a trap to keep the hot liquid filled copper coil surrounded by really hot air.

        To explain the added mirror reflector shields surrounding and mounted to the outside of the receiver, my thought was to re-direct any drifting mirror reflections back into the box.  This could possibly be done away with if after I have done more testing, I find that the mirror adjustments are staying in place as planned, hopefully.  To insulate the inside of the box from losing temperatures to the outside due to radiation and convection, I will use a high temperature insulating material and line the inside of it.  That should almost nullify any losses due to that condition.  To counter any radiation losses I thought about using a tin foil shield behind the insulation to kind of reflect back into the box those losses.  On the very first solar hot water flat plate collector I made back in the 70’s, I was absolutely amazed at the heat rays emanating from a one foot piece of exposed un-insulated pipe, before the whole thing exploded on me.  That was a big flat plate collector by the way.   In the screen shot on the bottom left and right are one quarter inch holes in both sides for mounting the box to a wooden support frame that will be strategically set to allow all mirrors to reflect the most perpendicular angle possible into the receiver without the receiver blocking any sun to the mirrors.  I could be wrong but this I believe is called the “critical angle” and I don’t think it refers to the “angle of incidence.”  The back side of this receiver will be at a near perpendicular angle to our sun.