Solar Tower Used to Test Space Materials

For the last two years, tests have been conducted at Sandia National Laboratories' National Solar Thermal Test Facility to apply heat equivalent to 1,500 suns to spacecraft shields called Advanced Charring Ablators. The ablators protect spacecraft entering atmospheres at hypersonic speeds. The test facility includes a "solar tower" surrounded by by a field of hundreds of sun-tracking mirror arrays called heliostats.  The heliostats direct sunlight to the top of the tower where the test objects are located.

The National Solar Thermal Test Facility is located on an eight-acre field of 220 solar-collection heliostats and a 200-ft.-tall tower that receives the collected energy at one of several test bays. A single heliostat includes 25 mirrors that are each four feet square. The total collection area is 88,000-square feet. Because the heliostats are individually computer controlled, test radiation can be a shaped pulse as well as a square wave in terms of intensity vs. time.

Test samples are mounted high in the receiver tower, and the heliostats direct the sunlight upward to irradiate the sample surface. The samples are mounted in a water-cooled copper plate inside the tower's wind tunnel with a quartz window that allows entry of the concentrated radiation.

Resource: Sandia Conducts Tests at Solar Tower to Benefit Future NASA Space Explorations, Sandia press release, September 7, 2005

More blogs about solar, solar tower, energy

Comments

[Petroleum Chemicals]

This is a very attractive segment, gave me a lot of help, thank you for sharing, hope you can update more and better stories.One of my conclusions after having worked for over a decade translating research into practice is that the system of having academic researchers in one silo and learning professionals in another silo simply isn't working.

[photobioreactors]

The Photobioreactors are used in producing an alternative source of energy in the form of bio fuels from algae. There are extensive studies and research done in order to perfect the process in deriving clean and natural fuels from algae biomass. Not only is this source good for the planet but is also cost effective and possible for use even in average households.