文档介绍：Solar aspects of papers
CONVERSION OF SOLAR ENERGY VIA NEW AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGY
by
J. H. Bloomer., DISCRAFT Corp., Portland, OR 97233
Presented 1994 to IECEC: AIAA/IEEE/ASME/SAE/AIChE/ACS/ANS
(Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference)
Aerospace technology today would access solar energy in space in any practical desired quantity, and beam it down to earth for unlimited use in manufacturing, agriculture, housing, education, recreation, science, astronautics.
Questions are, though: How access solar energy in space? Satellite mirrors driving heat turbogenerators? Satellite solar cells? Sunpumped lasers? And how deliver the energy to earth’s vicinity? By microwave beam? By laser beam? How transport the energy down through the atmosphere? Microwave beam? Laser beam? Power cable? And how pick the energy up on the ground? Rectenna farm? Collector mirror? Cable downlink? At what cost? Cost to whom? And when available?
This author respectfully submits that a mixture of new and old technologies can satisfactorily solve all problems, and provide all answers.
For one, lasers, because providing immensely tighter, narrower, longer range beams, must be preferred in the long run to masers, as most authors agree(1). But laser diffraction-limited transmitter-antenna optics (just maximum-quality astronomical primaries in large size) have heretofore been very difficult, expensive or impossible to build – particularly for space. Since ’66, though, there appears to have been a solution (declassified in ‘65(2)), based essentially on introducing very shallow, static, capillary-boundary-constrained, reflective, liquid-metal-plated, liquid-plastic pools onto interior surfaces of “rigidized” balloons erected (inflated) in orbit(3,4,5) somewhat in the fashion of “Echo”(6) (Figs. 1,2,3). These pools in capillary (“zero-g”) fashion, pull themselves –their own surfaces- into precision optical mirrors (as retouched by deliberately-introduced static masses providing “self-grav