0:00 – My experiment with a focusing balloon
0:24 – Solar balloons from Cool Earth Solar
0:52 – Solar balloons from HELIOVIS AG
1:28 – 10 types of cheap mirrors on my YouTube channel
2:15 – The best use for the balloons
Everyone can buy a similar balloon, but I removed the reflective layer from one of its sides using a household detergent based on a small percentage of HCl. Now you can see that my balloon is focusing the solar radiation here because the gas inside the balloon is giving this reflective wall a parabolic shape, and therefore this surface is a focusing mirror.
The fact that the cost of similar balloons is tens of times cheaper than these traditional focusing mirrors became the main idea of this American company, and they made balloons out of 2 cheap films, this reflective film and this transparent film. This is one of their balloons which will focus the solar radiation onto this solar panel, and they planned to build large solar power plants of this type with millions of balloons which are equipped with these small solar panels.
But this Austrian company is proposing a different way to generate electricity using this large balloon. Their balloon focuses solar radiation not on a point, but on a line here, where the focus of solar radiation heats a heat transfer fluid to high temperatures which provide energy to a turbine with an electric generator. They want to make a lot of these balloons to produce a lot of electricity, similar to these solar power plants with traditional mirrors. Interestingly, their balloon has this reflective film which takes on the desired shape due to the air pressure here is slightly greater than the pressure here.
My YouTube channel systematically describes my experiments with 10 types of cheap mirrors for producing very cheap thermal energy and electricity. My 3 previous videos described cheap mirrors based on glass rectangles, mirror steel, and reflective film on expanded polystyrene.
This video is about the 4th type which is based on balloons, and their unexpected advantages and other features were described in these my old videos which also show my experiments with mirror balloons.
I remind you that my YouTube channel explores a new type of solar power plants based on motionless mirrors but moving receivers which absorb solar energy from the mirrors and convert it into thermal energy which will be converted into electrical energy. This electricity will be cheaper than electricity from thermal and nuclear power plants if the cost of that solar thermal energy is about 0.5 cent / kWh, and this is one of the possibilities to achieve that goal.
Unfortunately, it looks like this goal will be easier to achieve not for balloons, but for those other 9 types of cheap mirrors, and an especially difficult task will be to achieve these targets for the lifespan of balloons and the cost of their replacements. But mirror balloons seem interesting not for my motionless mirrors, but for solar power plants of these types, where mirrors must constantly rotate according to the movement of the sun across the sky.
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