The world's cheapest tracker for solar heaters Parabolic trough
Sergiy Yurko Sergiy Yurko
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 Published On Oct 10, 2021

This is my solar station which is about 10 times cheaper than these well-known mirror heaters for a large solar power plant.

This is technical testing of my new prototype. This is its concave mirror which focuses solar radiation on this receiver.

Now I am showing how my new tracker changes the vertical position of the receiver. The cost of this tracker is several tens of times less than the cost of turning systems of mirrors for these expensive solar heaters.

My tracker requires my receiver to have these springs. That is why the receiver lowers when the weight of the water in these containers increases. If the water gradually leaves the container, the receiver rises.

We understand that a similar water container should be located on each of these battens, but these 2 battens should have containers with a volume of almost 2 times less. Nevertheless, a solar station must have a single pump which moves water to all containers simultaneously when we want to lower our receivers. That is why all receivers of a large solar station change their position by the same value, and I will describe the principles of unified control of all receivers in one of my future videos, after several winter experiments during frosts.

I remind you that now my solar station does not have any trackers, and the rows of my solar heaters are located along this West-East line, unlike these well-known solar heaters where this West-East line is perpendicular, not parallel.

Now I will show photos of this spot of solar radiation from my absolutely motionless mirrors at these points in time of one day around the summer solstice. Now my receiver is absolutely motionless all day long, and these photos give us an understanding of how our new tracker should change the position of the receiver from morning to evening.

This is a similar experiment, but on a different day, around the vernal equinox, and we see that the spot from my motionless mirrors accurately hits my motionless receiver all day long. A similar situation will be around the autumn equinox, but the closer to the winter solstice, the more we need the tracker to change the position of our receiver.

Now I am showing how I can change the vertical angle of my mirrors. I do this operation about once a week, but now my solar heaters do not have trackers. If I install those trackers, this operation will have to be done several times less often, about once a month or more rarely.

So, this was the 1st option to use my tracker when my mirrors have a different inclination in different months, located between these extreme positions. The 2nd option for using my tracker is such an absolutely fixed mirror which never changes its inclination. However, the position of this receiver is changed by the tracker, and this is its location in June, and this is its position in December. I am planning to explore both of the options, both this option and this option, and I will describe them in my future videos.

I remind you that my goal is to reduce the cost of our solar heat with a temperature of several hundred degrees to the level of 0.5 cent / kWh for the generation of very cheap electricity which is cheaper than electricity from solar panels or thermal power plants. This goal can be achieved if the total construction cost of similar solar heaters is less than 25 dollars per square meter of mirror. Therefore, my tracker should cost less than 2-3 dollars per square meter of mirror, and let's analyze whether this is true.

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