SOLAR CLUB CERN
LE FUTUR DU SOLAIRE THERMIQUE
Nouvelles des "tours
solaires"
· GP-Solar:
"the different solar panel" (en anglais et allemand)
· Solar Energy: EOHT, Electricity
Out of a Helicopter Turbine
The mountains of Armenia seem to have been created
for electric power stations working on solar energy. The scientists at
the Radio Physical Research Institute have chosen a ground on Aragats mountain,
which is 40 km to the west of Yerevan and situated 1750m above sea level.
Southern mountain Sun is a good source of cheap energy. It rises 73 degrees
above the horizon in summer and the atmosphere layer absorbing radiation
in the mountains is thinner.
The new electric power station "AREV" (the Armenian
for "Sun") is a big spherical mirror made of glass and fixed with props
on the slope of the mountain. The mirror has the slope of 40 degrees to
the horizon in order to catch the light all through the year. The sunbeams
fall on the concave mirror surface, than get reflected from its walls and
focus on a small circle in side the sphere. The area of the maximum heat
with the temperature rising above 80oC moves along the circle
following the Sun. Together with this hot spot a special heat exchange
device absorbing the heat moves over the mirror.
The device is a bell being 3m in diameter with double
walls, where a compressor supercharges air to. Heating up in the bell,
the air expands and revolves the vanes of the turbine, which is connected
with the electro generator. By the way, in this project the scientists
use a turbine of a helicopter that has already worked its resource in the
air. A photo sensor automatically operates all this mechanical construction
installed on a tower. Such an electric power station with the power of
100 kW produces rather cheap energy - 0.5 cent per kilowatt per hour. The
efficiency of the station is forty up to fifty per cent. AREV will work
ten hours per day in summer and eight hours per day in winter.
"The electric power station AREV-100 is
the first experimental sample of little power; the diameter of its spherical
mirror is thirty-six meters. The next installation with a seventy-five
meter mirror will be much more powerful, i.e. 1.5 megawatt", - says
Paris Herouni, the constructor of the station AREV.
At the summit in Okinawa in June, 2000, the
G-8 leaders pointed out two world global problems that the mankind is facing,
namely, information technologies development and use of renewable energy
resources - sun heat, wind energy, water and biomass. This raw material
for energy production will replace coal, oil, gas and uranium, the resources
of which are limited. That is why scientists from all over the world are
working on the projects for sun energy usage, which is the most efficient
of all the so-called unconventional power-engineering branches.
For further information, contact: Paris Misakovich Herouni,
academician,
Radio Physical Research Institute, director, Yerevan, Armenia, +7 (885
1) 234631, (374 1) 234780, herouni@sci.am
