why can’t we use lenses to focus solar rays and make electricity ore heat water more efficiently?
In: Engineering
Lenses are like magnifying glasses – they can focus sunshine into a tiny, hot point. That sounds like it would be perfect to heat water or make electricity! But lenses have a big problem. The sunshine moves all day long as the sun goes across the sky. The angle of the sunshine is different every hour. Lenses can only focus sunshine from one angle at a time, so for most of the day the focus point won’t be in the right place.
To make best use of solar power, we need something that can collect it from all different angles. Solar panels with lots of separate little cells do that. Each cell grabs a bit of sunshine and turns it into power, no matter what angle the sunshine hits. It’s like having a bucket with many tiny funnels instead of one big lens. More complicated, but it catches more sunshine overall.
So lenses aren’t flexible enough for good solar collectors. But they ARE still great for focusing sunshine to melt marshmallows or ant hills!
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