Area utilization efficiency of a sloping heliostat system for solar concentration

L Y Wei1

  • 1University of Waterloo, Department of Electrical Engineering, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada.

Applied Optics
|February 15, 1983
PubMed

Related Concept Videos

Radiation Pressure: Problem Solving01:09

Radiation Pressure: Problem Solving

The radiation pressure applied by an electromagnetic wave on a perfectly absorbing surface equals the energy density of the wave. The wave's momentum also gets transferred to the surface when an electromagnetic wave is entirely absorbed by it. The rate at which momentum is transmitted to an absorbing surface perpendicular to the propagation direction equals the force on the surface.
The average value of the rate of momentum transfer divided by the absorbing area represents the average force per...
Hyperbolic and Inverse Hyperbolic Functions: Problem Solving01:30

Hyperbolic and Inverse Hyperbolic Functions: Problem Solving

An arched gate can be effectively modeled using a hyperbolic cosine profile because this type of function is smooth and symmetric about the vertical axis. When the arch is centered at the origin, its maximum height occurs at the center point. This symmetry ensures that any height below the crown of the arch is reached at two horizontal positions that are equal in distance from the centerline but lie on opposite sides.To determine where the gate reaches a height of five meters, the height of the...
Integration Applied to Polar Coordinates to Find Areas01:15

Integration Applied to Polar Coordinates to Find Areas

A rotating lawn sprinkler with an uneven spray pattern produces a variable reach as it distributes water in different directions. This directional variation in spray distance can be effectively described using polar coordinates, where the distance from the center is represented as a function of the angle of rotation. The path traced by the spray then forms a polar curve, which captures the irregularities in the sprinkler’s reach across the full rotation.To calculate the total area watered by...
Lagrange Multipliers: Problem Solving01:30

Lagrange Multipliers: Problem Solving

A silo with a cylindrical base, flat bottom, and hemispherical roof is a common design in agricultural and industrial storage due to its structural efficiency and ease of construction. Optimizing its dimensions to maximize storage capacity for a given amount of material—i.e., a fixed surface area—is a classic problem in applied calculus and engineering design. The key parameters are the radius r of the base and the height h of the cylindrical section.The total volume of the silo is obtained by...
Surface Area Calculations01:22

Surface Area Calculations

Surface area calculations for a graph z = f(x, y) are fundamental in engineering applications involving curved structures such as satellite dishes. A parabolic dish reflects communication signals efficiently, but engineers must determine its exact curved surface area to estimate coating materials, fabrication costs, and structural requirements. Since the rim of the dish forms a circular boundary, the surface area is calculated over a circular domain in the xy-plane.Parametric Representation of...
Reflective Property of Parabolas01:26

Reflective Property of Parabolas

A parabola is a basic type of conic section that results from the intersection of a plane with a double-napped cone in a direction parallel to one of the cone's sides. This U-shaped curve has a distinctive reflective property: all incoming rays parallel to its axis of symmetry are directed toward a single point, known as the focus. This property is widely utilized in optical and communication technologies that require precise signal concentration.In analytic geometry, a parabola is defined as...