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A solar mirror contains a substrate with a reflective layer for reflecting the solar energy, and in most cases an interference layer. This may be a planar mirror or parabolic arrays of solar mirrors used to achieve a substantially concentrated reflection factor for solar energy systems.
Parabolic reflectors are popular for use in creating optical illusions. These consist of two opposing parabolic mirrors, with an opening in the center of the top mirror. When an object is placed on the bottom mirror, the mirrors create a real image, which is a virtually identical copy of the original that appears in the opening. The quality of ...
An external parabolic or elliptical mirror captures zenithal daylight, and converges it, to let it pass through a narrow opening in the exterior wall. On the inside, two parabolic mirrors widen the beam to around 60°. The floor area next to the conventional window is lit by the window. Anidolic mirror lighting systems can be divided into three ...
Liquid-mirror telescopes have rotating mirrors that consist of a liquid metal such as mercury or a low-melting alloy of gallium. These mirrors do not solidify and they are used while liquid and rotating. The rotation shapes them into paraboloids that are accurate enough to be used as primary reflectors in telescopes.
Working principle View to the East from the parabola center One of the 63 heliostats. The principle used is the concentration of rays by reflecting mirrors (9,600 of them). The solar rays are picked up by a first set of steerable mirrors located on the slope, and then sent to a second series of mirrors (the concentrators), placed in a parabola and eventually converging on a circular target, 40 ...
In March 2009, the German company Novatec Biosol constructed a Fresnel solar power plant known as PE 1. The solar thermal power plant uses a standard linear Fresnel optical design (not CLFR) and has an electrical capacity of 1.4 MW. PE 1 comprises a solar boiler with mirror surface of approximately 18,000 m 2 (1.8 ha; 4.4 acres). [12]
Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) is a concentrated solar power plant in California, United States. With the combined capacity from three separate locations at 354 megawatt (MW), it was for thirty years the world's largest solar thermal energy generating facility, until the commissioning of the even larger Ivanpah facility in 2014.
Archimedes may have used mirrors acting collectively as a parabolic reflector to burn ships attacking Syracuse. Archimedes is purported to have invented a large scale solar furnace, sometimes described as a heat ray, and used it to burn attacking Roman ships during the Siege of Syracuse (c. 213–212 BC). It does not appear in the surviving ...