IBM Models Human Blood System To Build Solar Power Prototype

coondoggie writes "IBM today said its researchers are developing a solar power system that concentrates solar radiation 2,000 times by using a human-blood supply modeled way of cooling and converting 80% of Sun's heat into useful energy. IBM says the system can also desalinate water and cool air in sunny, remote locations where such systems are often in short supply."

Re:Bigger Problems

[TheRealMindChild]

Actually, it applies to the function of blood to transfer excess heat out of the body. If you didn't have this function in your body, your insides would cook and your skin would be cold.

Re:Cray 2

[SuricouRaven]

A Cray 2 requires 200KW. The panels claim 80% efficiency, so you'd need 200/0.8 = 250KW. Sun intensity, ignoring atmosphere and with optimal panel orientation, is around 1.3KW/M^2. So you'd need 192 M^2 of panels. In practice you'd need space for panel orientation gear, plus atmospheric attenuation would reduce power, so you'd need rather more than that, but it's entirely practical. However, no running the Cray at night.

The Cray 2 had 1.3GF of floating-point processing power. A single i7 chip has 109GF, double-precision. The Cray 2 was without doubt one of the coolest looking computers ever built, but the technology is rather dated. You could comfortably emulate it on a modern desktop.

*European, not handegg.

Re:Cray 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun intensity, ignoring atmosphere and with optimal panel orientation, is around 1.3KW/M^2.

[citation needed]

But let me help you with that, since most solar power advocates can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that there is a physical limit to the amount of solar radiation that makes solar power a non-starter for baseload power generation:

Insolation [wikipedia.org] article on Wikipedia

The relevant excerpt, with the critical information in bold:

Over the course of a year the average solar radiation arriving at the top of the Earth's atmosphere at any point in time is roughly 1366 watts per square metre[3][4] (see solar constant). The radiant power is distributed across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, although most of the power is in the visible light portion of the spectrum. The Sun's rays are attenuated as they pass through the atmosphere, thus reducing the irradiance at the Earth's surface to approximately 1000 W /m2 for a surface perpendicular to the Sun's rays at sea level on a clear day.

The actual figure varies with the Sun angle at different times of year, according to the distance the sunlight travels through the air, and depending on the extent of atmospheric haze and cloud cover. Ignoring clouds, the daily average irradiance for the Earth is approximately 250 W/m2 (i.e., a daily irradiation of 6 kWh/m2), taking into account the lower radiation intensity in early morning and evening, and its near-absence at night.

So, 1.3 kW/m^2 if you can stick a solar panel at the top of the atmosphere and use a really long power cable; 1 kW/m^2 if you happen to be directly underneath the sun at sea level; but 0.25 kW/m^2 on average in general on non-cloudy days over all 24 hours - or, equivalently, 0.75 kW/m^2 per hour over 8 hours of reasonably direct sunlight.