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IMAGE ©NASA Daedalus crater shows the problem the indirect solar receiver solves. Orlando’s team proposes positioning solar concentrating mirrors – heliostats – atop the crater rims, aiming concentrated solar irradiation down into the darkness of the crater, with the light focused onto a solar receiver partly embedded in the icy surface to heat it to …
Continue reading “A buried solar receiver to melt lunar ice”
Following their review, published at Astra Astronautica, covering all previous research using concentrated solar energy to generate heat for melting lunar regolith, co-authors Stéphane Abanades, Silvain Rodat and PhD student, Jack Robinot, propose that the most promising technology to extract oxygen using concentrated solar could be vacuum pyrolysis.They have just performed their first test. “We …
Continue reading “Solar vacuum pyrolysis leverages the lunar vacuum to mine oxygen”
IMAGE from: Terrestrial Demonstrator for the Hydrogen Extraction of Oxygen from Lunar Regolith with Concentrated Solar Energy °C Thorsten Denk Working at the Plataforma Solar de Almería (PSA), aerospace engineer Thorsten Denk has further refined his solar reactor for extracting lunar oxygen directly from ilmenite (FeTiO3), an abundant mineral in lunar regolith. Inspired by NASA’s …
Continue reading “PSA advances a solar reactor to extract oxygen from lunar ilmenite”
Solar collector sytem from GlassPoint under construction in California for Searles Valley Minerals (a glass container will encompass all the solar collectors) IMAGE © GlassPoint GlassPoint has secured a partnership to generate its solar steam for Searles Valley Minerals (SVM), a hundred- and fifty-year-old California mining and production firm, one of the largest local employers …
Continue reading “Solar steam from Glasspoint to decarbonize a California mine”
Outward Technologies Lunar Articulating Mirror Array SolarPACES interviews Ryan Garvey, Founder and Principal Research Scientist at Outward Technologies, which has NASA funding to develop its concentrated solar system for resource extraction, surface construction, and habitat development on the Moon and other planetary bodies, using solar 3D printing of landing pads, roadways, and habitats directly from …
Continue reading “Startup concentrates solar to melt NASA’s lunar landing pads”
A small pipe extending along the central focal point of the parabolic trough is the solar reciever in Trough CSP Researchers have developed a completely different way for Trough CSP to collect solar energy. Normally, in this form of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), long lines of huge ‘trough’-shaped parabolic mirrors move slowly all day as …
Continue reading “How rotating the solar receiver could cut Trough CSP land use”
Star receiver compared to cylindrical receiver. IMAGE © Enhancing solar tower competitiveness with star-shaped receivers. In a comprehensive new study published in Applied Energy, researchers at Politecnico di Milano and Queensland University of Technology find that a new streamlined version of a star-shaped solar receiver can collect more thermal energy and last significantly longer than today’s …
Continue reading “New star-shaped solar receiver cuts costs and prolongs tower CSP life”
3D-printed vermiculite and alumina samples. IMAGE © Thermal energy storage behaviour of 3D ceramic:molten salt structures under real concentrated solar radiation. Researchers collaborating between ICV-CSIC in Spain and at the Odeillo solar furnace in France have devised a novel way to maximize thermal energy storage in Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants. They wanted to encapsulate …
Continue reading “3D-printed ceramics tested to maximize thermal energy storage in molten salts ”
Silica sand mining – “Expanding the amount of energy that can be stored in sand is as simple as adding more sand” IMAGE © Homerun Resources which is working with NREL on using its silica sand for thermal energy storage “Expanding the amount of energy that can be stored in sand is as simple as …
Continue reading “ARPA-E-winning thermal energy storage in sand wins commercial interest”
Work on the G3P3 particle receiver system at Sandia National Laboratories IMAGE © Sandia National Laboratories In 2018, three years after the completion of the second of two utility-scale tower-type Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants in the US, the Department of Energy (DOE) held a competition to decide the funding direction for the next generation …
Continue reading “Sandia’s Gen-3 particle-based CSP demo to debut this fall”