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The tracking solar accumulator project.
  • Wolfgang Scheffler did Solar kitchens that use a large parabolic dish section on equatorial mount to cook food and sometimes accumulate heat for later.  The dish section is distorted as the seasons change to keep its parabolic nature and keep focused.  The solar accumulator tries to achieve the same thing without distorting the dish.   Instead of distorting the shape, the dish rotates around the focal point to do the seasonal change. Equatorial mount means one daily seasonal adjustment and then a timed rotation will keep the thing pointed at the sun all day.  I made the first attempt a few years back and learned from it.
    Videos of my progress are on youtube under my name "gaiatechnician". For the project, I "invented" dripper trackers. (3 versions depending on your technology level).  Also I made the "mechanical Mathematician" which uses simple tools to make a parabolic dish or partial parabolic dish directly. It is very useful because it also gives you your focal point. (Really important if you are making a partial dish).  The dual dish tracking solar accumulator has not been made yet, and neither has the "liquid piston tracker"
    Anyway, it is a large project and I do not have the time to develop it much further. Anyone want to join in?
    Edited to add, 
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    are parts of the tracking solar accumulator project.
    Brian White, Victoria  BC Canada
     
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  • I have put all the cone solar stuff in a playlist http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PL608E5F0EB26CDDE0  It goes from designing the cones to making them and shows the mount with 3 point linkage too.  Thanks
    Brian
     
  • It sounds like your work would be a useful addition to the OSE wiki.  Are you contributing as such?  If so, and you need help to move the material, let people know (including me).  Folks are willing to help.  Then, someone some day will pick up where you left off and we will all benefit.

    - Mark Norton

     
  • The playlist isn't working. Can you repost the link?
     
  • is one of my videos. and my youtube is http://www.youtube.com/user/gaiatechnician You can access the playlist from there, I hope. I don't know why the link didn't work.  Lately I have been doing short videos from my camera because I have time pressure.   All my stuff is open source and I put some of it on instructables under their community commons license (with commercial use allowed).  The tracking solar accumulator project is a huge project really. I really started it as a lower tech alternative to Scheffler solar kitchens. I used junk parts from office chairs in mine but in other places bicycles could be used instead.
    By all means include it in your plans. One thing that I could not do yet is called the liquid piston tracker. It was provisionally accepted as a project for a student on the mecatronics course in University of Victoria last year. (it was "perfect" for the course)    But they did not go with it because I am not a commercial entity!  This ruled it  out of the course.
    I did try the clock based and water clock dripper trackers to turn my equatorial mount. Most people think they are stupid ideas but  even on the tiny scale of my demo's they were much stronger than they looked. They withstood wind very well.
    http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Tracking has some drawings and videos of the ideas.  Some of the stuff I did is also on http://solarcookers.ning.com/
    Hope that helps
    Brian

     
  • Brian has started a wiki page for the Tracking Solar Accumulator at http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Tracking_solar_accumulator
     

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