Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
(OP)
Would anyone like to nitpick this paper for me? Any glaring errors? Any laws of nature that would outright prevent it? Or impracticalities with the same result?
http://www.geocities.com/womplex_oo1/AeroSpace.html
http://www.geocities.com/womplex_oo1/AeroSpace.html





RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
TTFN
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
Could you explain how your theorem gets in the way of this mechanism?
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
In other words the best that can be done is to /equal/ the solar light flux from the naked sun.
Cheers
Greg Locock
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
In order to get the beam to be focused onto the 600m diameter relay located 10^11 km requires a beam divergence of less than 10^-10 radians. Since the input to the collector is almost 2pi radians, that requires a collector optical magnification of about 10^11 times, which means that the exit aperture of the collecting optics needs to be about 600*10^11 m in diameter to get the divergence down. Otherwise, with a smaller exit aperture, all that energy is simply going to rattle around inside the collector and melt it into a slag. But, building a 600*10^11 m aperture is a non trivial exercise.
As a practical example, we deal with laser designators here, and one particular design starts with a 1/2 inch beam that's magnified to get the divergence down to 1/5 of the input beam to meet the spec value. This results in the beam diameter increasing by the same 5x.
TTFN
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
Your experience is warped by your perceptions. The input to the magnifying glass is nearly collimated. When you focus the beam to a spot, the effective divergence is increased from milliradians to degrees. You can check this by taking the arctangent of the diameter of the glass divided by the distance to the spot.
Now do the reverse. Imagine that the spot is the collecting aperture and that you need to reduce divergence to picoradians, which means that you'll have an exit aperture like the magnifying glass, relative to the spot diameter.
You can believe or not, but the optics is what it is.
TTFN
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
TTFN
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
Ar*At = wavelength^2 * distance^2 * ln(1/(1-n))
where
n = the fraction of the energy received, if the beam has a guassian profile.
Sunlight is composed of a wide range of wavelengths. Integrating across the spectrum yields the results that I described in my paper.
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
RE: Optical Solar Power Satellite Relay
TTFN