This article in Wired magazine is worth following up on, although I have never seen one of these vast solar mirror arrays, I can see this technology filtering down to the domestic house rather quickly, and in part we have seen this style of tech before in the young man who figured out that leafs on a tree are twisted and positioned to get the max sun.
So whats it all about, well reading the article, it seems that the sunflower has sorted out a pattern for the florets, the little flowers in the centre of the plant, that allows the max amount of light to fall on any floret, without any or very little shadow. why is this so important, well, if the layout of the solar reflectors is done in the same way, then the area needed to produce the same amount of power can be reduced,
Where is the CPD, well is as I said earlier, for me it’s the domestic market, I have long thought that house designs need to change and perhaps now the layout of large estates, I live at the end of a cul de sac, on a corner plat, so our house gets the max sunlight, as we have no neighbouring house on the south side, but because of the use of standard house types, in an East West orientation, the only thing getting all the sun is a brick gable wall, my neighbours house to the north only gets the early and late sun, because of the shadow cast from our house, so perhaps if the same methodology of the sunflower is applied to the estate layouts we could at it’s lowest level get better orientated house plots and at best make use of the sun in Photo voltaic arrays, not I might add as hideous bolt on panels but cladding that are essentially built of PV material.
I’m claiming 1 hour of CPD, I had to read the article several times to understand the tech, I then followed up on sunflowers tracking the sun, this site has a nice little movie, and this site has some very interesting facts, like
“The default direction of the sunflower head is to point east towards sunrise (the location of the sun when it rises over the horizon in the morning.) During the day motor cells in the sunflower stem tilt the flower bud to try to receive a maximum amount of sunlight. By evening, the sunflower head is pointing west, towards sunset (the location of the sun on the horizon just before it is no longer visible.) This causes the sunflower to basically trace a 180 degree arc, tracking the sun’s position throughout the day, from horizon to horizon, sunrise to sunset. Overnight, the sunflower will reset to its original eastward positioning and wait for the morning, ready to follow the sun’s path once again. Once blooming however, sunflowers no longer exhibit heliotropic behaviour, and the stem is generally frozen into an eastward-facing position”
The article on wired mentions The arrangement of the florets as a form of Fermat spiral, as always Wiki has a nice example, I have no idea at present how this might be applied to a planning situation, but I’m going to give it some thought.
Below I have listed more links that might prove interesting, from my Zemanta account,,,, enjoy
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