In article , David M. Palmer
wrote:

In article
,
William Mook wrote:

Right, but you haven't shown the numbers either. Do a ray tracing
with OSLT or something like that. You will see that when there are
two suns in the sky there are two disks on the image plane, two of
them line up - two of them do not. You will see that when the sun
grows larger in the sky the image grows larger on the image plane and
the same thing applies. This is how thermodynamics is preserved.

Do a ray tracing ON WHAT? You haven't specified a configuration.

NUMBERS NUMBERS NUMBERS.

Since Mook hasn't replied, and since this thread is likely to turn up
under Google when people doing due diligence are wondering whether
William Mook of Mokenergy is a con artist trying to raise money by
fraud, or just incompetent at optics, I may as well go with numbers
that have been piecemealed elsewhere in this thread, along with further
numbers guessed.

A D1=25 mm diameter primary lens was mentioned, as well as a 5000x
concentration. That gives an image diameter of
id1=25 mm/sqrt(5000) = 0.35 mm .
This is presumably the diameter of the image produced by a the primary.

Use a solar angular diameter of 10 mrad to make the numbers easier,
that gives a primary focal length of
f1 = 0.35 mm/10e-3 = 35 mm
That's an fratio1=1.4 lens, which is reasonable.

There is an array of concave lenses slightly before the primary's focal
plane, where each lens is designed to refocus the sun's image on the
concentrated photovoltaic (CPV). These lenses include a prism
component so that the lenses out to one side deflect the light back to
the centerline, but we can ignore that for now and use the central
secondary lens, as an example. Let's place the CPV 35 mm beyond the
secondary lens array so that the deflection angles are symmetric.

Since we don't want the secondary lenses to have to be too much larger
than the at-f1 spot size (or else you can't fit as many secondary
lenses as you want) let's use an f2=-0.5 mm focal length for the
secondaries. This doubles the diameter of the lens required to get all
of the light from the Sun, assuming that the sun is aligned with the
centers of the lenses.
D2=id1 + abs(f2) / fratio1 = 0.7 mm

EIther f2 or the distance of the secondary from the f1 plane are
slightly different so that a spot on the sun is focussed onto the CPV.
But at our level of accuracy this doesn't affect the calculations much.

Is that a reasonable approximation of your setup, Mook?


The problem is that this does not concentrate the sun on the CPV to a
useful extent. This configuration of a big long focal length positive
lens and a small short focal length negative lens (which Mook refers to
as being like a microscope condensor) is a galilean telescope.

The magnification of the telescope is
M=f1/f2 = 35 mm/0.5 mm = 70x
and it is working in "eyepiece projection" mode, so the sun casts an
image of diameter
Dimage = 10e-3 radians * M * 35 mm = 24.5 mm

So basically, Mook's system takes the light falling on a 25 mm entrance
aperture, and concentrates it on a circle 24.5 mm in diameter. (In the
best case scenario where the Sun is perfectly aligned.)

You can tweak the parameters a bit, and get positive gain, but not by
orders of magnitude while keeping the system approximately the same.
(Mook, do you have numbers that do significantly better?)

If Mook did a proper ray tracing he knows this (hence his silence the
past week), and if he still is still trying to raise money on his
scheme then he is a con artist.

If Mook tried to do a ray tracing and did not find this, then he is
incompetent at optics.

If Mook did not do a ray tracing, then he is merely negligent.

--
David M. Palmer (formerly @clark.net, @ematic.com)