From: TEDennis 7/8/2014 12:31:42 PM
of 2436
IAS/RaPower3 issues #3
From the Yahoo forum:
On the "Solutions" page of the RaPower3 website, there is a picture that shows a wireframe diagram of the apparatus that suspends the heat collectors ("Magic Balls") and the concentrators. To find a glitch with that particular design, all it takes is a little bit of THINKing about what that mechanism has to do.
To track the sun from sunrise to sunset, the pods will have to be perpendicular (or close to it) to the ground at sunrise and parallel to the ground at noon'ish. There's NO WAY that design would allow such a positioning, because there are pipes that connect the platforms together.
Those pipes extend the entire way around the bottom of the platform, making a square shape. Now, HOW could the pod structure tilt far enough for them to be perpendicular to the ground when those pipes are there? The pipe around the bottom will contact the tower pole as it tilts. It looks like the maximum they can tilt is about 40 degrees. Perpendicular would be a 90 degree tilt, so that design doesn't even come CLOSE to meeting the need.
See? It didn't take an expert in mechanical engineering to figure that out.
Check out the pictures from 2013 to see one of their "solutions" to that problem. In particular, see PIC010 at the IAUSenergy website. Click on "Pilot Plant Pictures", then "Dec 2013". It shows that two heat collectors are suspended from a single pole, with two additional stabilizing poles, for a total of 3 poles per 2 platform. One of the pipes between the heat collectors is bent in the middle to allow them to tilt past the tower pole.
If/when they finally realize they can't support all the weight of the current design and the pods sway enough to cause the sun to miss the top of the concentrator, they will probably have to redesign the entire platform suspension system. Obviously, the suspension system needs to be sturdier. I suspect the new design will have 4 poles for EACH heat collector platform, instead of only 3 poles per pair of platforms. Another redesign means that all the time they spent trying to make the existing design function properly will have been wasted.
I suspect the redesign will be similar to the original design from way back when ... see PIC002 in the May 2008 pictures. SIX YEARS AGO. If they revert to something like that, it's likely they will encounter the same kinds of problems they ran into with that design. What were those problems? I don't know, but they didn't redesign the system just for kicks. There had to be SOMETHING wrong with that design. I suspect using something similar to that design will be pretty heavy, which would add more stress to an already shoddy dual-axis tracking system.
R&D is supposed to be completed, remember?
Sure is a pretty day.
TED
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