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19-Year-Old Makes Homemade Solar Death Ray
An anonymous reader writes "Concentrated solar power has the potential to generate immense amounts of energy — but it can also be amazingly destructive. American student Eric Jacqmain has assembled over 5,800 mirrors into his own parabolic 'solar Death Ray'."
Looks like the mythbusters can redo this myth one more time.
This is what a science education lets you do. Stay in school kids!
Move sig!
Looks like lots of energy to me, burning wood that fast how many watts will that take? glass is cheap, dishes are cheap, metal container to boil water is cheap. What's the usability of such energy producing machinery?
reminds me of this : http://www.solarplaza.com/news/spain-abengoa-fires-up-worlds-largest-solar-tow
couldnt this be used to boost solar cells?
That, that really grinds my gears!
The 19-year old claims that his solar device has the intensity of 5,000 suns.
Yeah right! Sure!
You could get a nasty case of sunstroke from that thing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I mean the focus is close enough that he could kill anything anyway by smacking it over the head with the reflector. Be nice if the focus was a bit further away.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Solar power does not "generate" energy. Energy is liberated by conversion from mass through nuclear reactions in the Sun. Solar power collects and transforms radiant energy into heat and then into useful work, like burning something up.
Well I did warn you, you didn't have to read it!
Like ~2,000 years ago. Talk about an old story.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
"The 19-year old claims that his solar device has the intensity of 5,000 suns."
Surely it has the intensity of 5,800 x the amount of solar energy collected by a tiny mirror 93m miles away from the sun?
Also lol @ it being destroyed in a shed fire -- I wonder how that came about? :-)
What if I took a picture of it with my flash on?
Would I be vaporized or at least slightly singed?
Speaking of which...
How did they even take a picture of it without burning to death?
5800 mirrors, the size of fingernails. Glued on an already parabolic disc.
Couldn't he just have spray canned it with some reflective paint??
I imagined at least 10x10cm mirrors. Now that would have been "solar power".
wake me up when he heating his house with this. This little satellite disc is kids stuff.
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
To use as a pocket lighter. Moreover, it might ignite one's face if trying to light a cigarette. Thus, I see this as nothing more than lawsuit waiting to happen. You just know some idiot is going to roast his/her face and then blame it on this kid.
The Japanese spent ages working on a death ray in World War 2. How long til something like this ends up in active service?
So he got an existing parabolic dish (satellite receiver) and covered it in reflective material, inexplicably using thousands of tiny pieces of mirror instead of a simple, readily available sheet or coating, used it to burn some stuff for lulz, then left it out somewhere such that it started a fire and burnt itself up. Very pro. This is surely a wonderful, novel demonstration of human ingenuity and cleverness. =/
As people have already mentioned, this is nothing new. Gluing small mirrors on a preexistent parabolic surface is... tedious work, but nothing spectacular.
Like this has never been done before
Check out this guys "Light Sharpener" project...
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish23.shtml
Sun power is ~ 1 KW/m*2 (full sun)
He said it was destroyed in a shed fire. He must have left it near a window in the shed. Now that's funny.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
This is a really cool toy, but way too powerful for me to be comfortable having it anywhere near me. It's like having a loaded gun in the house, except that there are no standard safety procedures to follow for storage and use. It'd be too easy to have a serious accident. Heck the kid even destroyed his shed with that very same death ray.
There's nothing to worry about, everyone stay calm!
And me thinking a 19yr old had a death ray to blow up the sun...silly me...
Now excuse me i have to go drive my explosion death engine.
Actually they have already done it 3 times. First in 2004, then with help from MIT folks in 2006 and last being the recent "President's challenge".
This is not news, me and my entire physics class made these in 11th grade and managed to fry steaks to an edible level.
The whole point of the death ray is to be able to adjust the focus point.
The Mythbusters tried to set a boat on fire... which was assumed to be an enemy boat passing along the coast.
You can't reasonably expect the enemy boats to sail exactly at the focus point of your death ray... or to either come closer or go further away in case they are not at the focus point of your death ray.
This 19-year-old hasn't made the focus point adjustable... so you can't set a moving target at a variable distance on fire with it.
Any dish shaped thing with mirrors has a focus point - especially satellite dishes - so this isn't exactly rocket science.
Oddly enough, the focal point is probably exactly where the feedhorn would be. Not really hard to figure out, especially when the satellite tv dish manufacturer has already done the engineering for you.
And really this is the same principle as a magnifying glass, only bigger. Hardly "death ray" material.
Create a parabolic with a focus capable of melting a car 50 meters away - then I'll be impressed.
Sampenzus posts Idle article on Slashdot with misleading headline.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
In the Himalayas, parabolic mirrors around this size are commonly used to boil kettles of water for tea/cooking.
It works at those altitudes, because the sunlight is more intense (less having been absorbed by the atmosphere), and because water boils at a lower temperature at the lower atmospheric pressure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker#Solar_kettles
What does that complement definition leave for the actual "generation of energy". Is there any acceptable process that generates energy?
I for one welcome our new 19 year old, death ray equipped overlords.
Department of Homeland Security in three ... two ... one ...
Oh wait. He's not a foreigner. Carry on.
He choosed a very complicated way to just build a solar oven ("four solaire" in french).
http://www.google.com/images?q=four+solaire
http://www.google.com/images?q=solar+oven
Reading the new, I thought I will see a fool building a new solar plant in his garden... Like (in smaller size) the one in Spain (PS10), or the one in france (Odeillo).
http://www.ecosources.info/images/energie_industrie/Tour-solaire-concentration-PS10.jpg
http://www.heliome-solaire.fr/l_energie-solaire/utiliser-l_energie-solaire/four-solaire-odeillo.jpg
Note: if its just to burn some stuff, my chidren use a magnifying glass and its enough.
-- Laurent Pointal
If it truely did have such capacity, I'm pretty sure it'd burn a hole in the atmosphere. It barely has the intensity of one.
Would it be possible to pass the focussed light through a lens to make a concentrated ray? Or would the lens melt?
We get the warhead and we hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
...unless it has an exposed exhaust port?
These mirrors are pretty thick, and when glued on the surface of the dish, he actually ended up with the mirror surface being out of alignment, so the focus point is far more smeared than that of the original, precisely designed and aligned dish.
The proper thing to do would have been to chemically deposit a very thin silver layer on the dish surface. This is actually not difficult to achieve. The mentioned spray paint or aluminum foil solutions are also better than his really, really crude approach.
Solar Oven, not "death ray";
its not a myth, not something for that TV show;
mirror method must have been cumbersome but appears effective;
close focal point is for safety!;
that tin-can aiming method is not unique but is pragmatic.
Wonderful, now all wars will be confined to daylight hours. Anyway I guess the title to this story wouldn't have drawn as many eyeballs if he was building a "solar peace ray".
Big bang type events may actually be generating energy, but other than that everything is conversion. The common definition of generating energy can be seen as converting it from a useless type (tied up in an atom, in oil or flowing as radiation) to a more useful type (electricity or molecular bonds).
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
for that long doing a menial task.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
He bedazzled a satellite dish, mounted it on a wagon with a 2x4 a painted it silver? This made it on Slashdot?
In middle school back in the 70's my brother covered the underside of an umbrella with aluminium foil, turned it over, mounted a grate on the handle/shaft near the focus, and grilled hot dogs using sunlight. It can be made much quicker.
In your face, Sheldon Cooper!
Solar death ray defeated only by its arch nemeses, "Cloudy Day", and "Shed".
The Light Sharpener...
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml
Nathan
As long as they hold very still at exactly two feet away from me. Would you place your head directly on the focal point of my rig? Thans, I appreciate it, it's a pain the ass to aim this thing.
Now that one of us invented this, instead of the people who have been using this for at least a century, it's now a discovery. Reminds me of the 10 different people that managed to invent the same solar oven in one century.
sheds. (oops, left the Death Ray in that last one!)
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
He promised death...
Yeah, I used to burn ants with a magnifying glass too when I was much younger than 19. Solar death rays are pretty common at that age.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This kid's implementation is cute.. but, come on now.. THIS is a proper version built years back:
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml
The larger tiles do make for a less-focused spot, but the much, much larger area makes up for that and then some.
3 Tags offered -
slashdot, idle, terrorists...
Is this a joke? I mean, I always knew /. was rather hokey - but what exactly is this? How is this labeled similar to "Terrorists"?
Is this /.'s way of trying to join the brainwashing bandwagon? RUN RUN - Fear Fear - those all powerful cave dwellers are going to get you!
If they don't, then global warming will - err, I mean Climate change.
So if anyone can create their own deathrays without needing all sorts of funky materials or high energy, I guess it might be easier to just use this when you need to cut metal, instead of all the energy we use to do it in industrial sector...would save major money, no?
The guy over at Green Power Science http://www.youtube.com/user/GREENPOWERSCIENCE plays with parabolic mirrors and fresnel lenses all the time doing some fun stuff with them.
When I saw the headline, the Cockeyed one was my very first thought. Yes, well before the Archimedes one and certainly before Mythbusters, which I think is very much an American phenomenon.
Hmmm- maybe this is how they built the Pyramids...
In the Himalayas, parabolic mirrors around this size are commonly used to boil kettles of water for tea/cooking.
It works at those altitudes, because the sunlight is more intense (less having been absorbed by the atmosphere), and because water boils at a lower temperature at the lower atmospheric pressure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker#Solar_kettles
Screw the Himalayas. I was 12 when our year 7 (1st year of junior high for you Americans) science class constructed solar ovens out of aluminium foil, a large tin can, coat hangar wire and masking tape. They were good enough to cook sausages and eggs and this was at sea level. It wasn't lame but it wasn't exactly difficult for a 12 year old. A smart but not genius 8 year old could do it.
The parabolic reflector is only one design. Just Google solar oven science project for kids
http://www.crystal-clear-science-fair-projects.com/solar-oven-science-project.html
http://www.columbiascientific.com/science-fair-experiments/garretts-solar-oven-science-project
This should not have been a slashdot story.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If you want to build a solar death ray you should use an elliptical reflector. Actually if you really want a good death ray you should use a large parabolic or spherical reflector positioned perpendicular to the sun, and a small elliptical reflector as an aiming/focusing unit.
This is basic evil engineering.
The light sharpener is the much more serious version done on an old school 12 foot satellite dish that is actually closer to deserving mention on slashdot. The article is annoyingly laid out over more than 20 pages, but it is kind of cool what he was able to do with that much concentrated solar power. He also didn't try any better methods of depositing a mirror on the dish. He did small tests with tinfoil and they showed the tinfoil was clearly less reflective than the mirror. Of course the problem with the huge old school dish is that it's a mesh, not a smooth parabola, so any silvering or foil deposition really would have required placing and polishing a smooth parabolic surface for maximum efficiency.
Didn't Cockerham do this already?
http://cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
An accident happens if you have a hammer in the shed and shed burns.
When you have a 'death ray' in a shed, and shed burns, you know it's not an 'accident'.
You can't handle the truth.
With a focal length of about 3 feet it's not exactly a death ray.
The reason this works and what the mythbusters tried did not has to do with the F ratio.
A lens (or mirror) with an F ratio of 1 will concentrate the sun enough to make a very small spot.
One with an F ratio of about 100 or more, not so much!
BTW, I wonder how that shed he stored the thing in burned down? Maybe it was facing a window facing the sun about 3 feet from a wall?
I was using a "solar death ray" when I was 9. It's called a magnifying glass. Great for killing ants.
Did anyone else notice that the needle nose pliers suffered no damage when holding objects? Or that his hand suffered no damage when it held objects? His thumb even enters the light "beam" but he doesn't even seem to feel any discomfort. Even if it had to be a specific 1 cm point to burn like the other objects one has to believe that anything entering the light circle would get at the very most hot to the point of discomfort.
In the end I think its a hoax
This is simultaneously awesome and horrifying. What do you think this kid's parents said when he told them he wanted to build a solar death ray?
No, it doesn't generate "energy" you fools, it's the SAME AMOUNT of energy!!! It's just concentrated, which is POWER. I know you're mostly a bunch of daydreaming software bitheads, but can you PLEASE check the basics!??
that's silly. it's a cooking mirror.
and it's totally no good for killing ants...
Did anyone else notice that the death ray did not even slightly damage the pliers?
That wasn't a problem, since his father was Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson
I guess someone should have told him to point the death ray AWAY from the window.
Loading...
This is boring. It would have been interesting if he actually did something useful with it, like mount a stirling engine to power something.
... until the neighborhood bullies decided to beat me up at night.
Have gnu, will travel.
As a firebug teenager, I was considering finding a Fresnel lens and focusing the beam on to a biconcave
In theory the biconcave lens would straighten out the converged beam straight again but now concentrated!
Alas at the time these Fresnel lens were only found in Overhead projectors. I couldn't find them for cheap and then I grew up.
Today Fresnel lenses are found is unwanted Projection TVs and are MUCH bigger. And you can shop for good quality biconcave lens that wont melt easily on the internet. Today I have no time or room to build such a thing. My wife would kill me!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
How do you focus the light now?
I applaud his effort in making an amateur solar-thermal device, but somewhat larger versions are being put to practical use generating electricity:
http://www.renewablepowernews.com/wp-content/uploads/Solar-thermal-Sterling-dish1.jpg
http://cdn.venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/brightsource2_620px.jpg
Concentrated sunlight can be used for a number of other things where you need a lot of heat, like cooking rocks to make cement, which is what then holds concrete together.
"Do not look at mirror with remaining eye"
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
As a kid, I had similar project known as "solar cooker" at the time. I had found blueprint for the device in the "Galaksija" magazine, which was very popular science magazine in former Yugoslavia. But my device was quite simpler and less powerful, but it could boil 2l of water in about 10min. if it is properly adjusted on bright summer day. :)
If you don't care where you are, then you ain't lost.
I recall reading that the Spanish plundered gold and silver discs that were several feet in diameter in their conquest of the South American peoples. It was suggested that they were solar concentrators similar to the one demonstrated, since smaller ones are known to have been used in lighting ritual fires, the larger ones may have had a more practical purpose, including shaping stone.
Doesn't that melt the pot that the water is in?
That's the kid that stole my 30 inch disco ball! He flattened out and DESTROYED IT!!! DAMN!
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
It doesn't produce a ray and I didn't see any death in the video. All I saw was a home-made parabolic reflector being used to concentrate sunlight...
No sig today...
It looks like the focal point is where the receiver would normally sit. He should have kept it on and added clamps to it so that way he'd have a fixed point to place his "victims". Bonus points if he chrome plates the next one in his back yard instead of using those stupid mirrors.
Sig: I stole this sig.
If focused was computer controlled. Each tiny mirror needs servo controls.
more cowbell
I wonder what happened.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
4 min video and no ants!!
The sci-fi book by John Ringo has a guy littering space with mirrors and using them for asteroid mining and killing aliens. The energy level talked about in the book was in petawatts, not sure how many square miles of mirrors that is. Though the closer to place them to the sun the stronger beam you can get.
Professor Ogden Wernstrom: And what will you be presenting this evening, professor?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Let's just say it'll put you young whippersnappers in your place.
Professor Ogden Wernstrom: I just hope it's not that lame death ray you presented last year.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Uh... last year, you say?
Professor Ogden Wernstrom: That's right.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Oh, my. Did it put you young whippersnappers in your place?
Professor Ogden Wernstrom: Hardly. We all laughed so hard our teeth fell out. Come along, Cinnamon.
[Wernstrom leaves with his fish]
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Oh, dear. I'll have to invent something new in the next ten minutes. Perhaps some sort of death ray.
Actually, I'd say that's entirely the wrong way to go about it.
The thing to remember is that ancient city states didn't work like Mythbusters. They didn't have to rely on just a squad of volunteers focusing one mirror at a time.
A city had tens of thousands of citizen-warriors which normally were eligible to put on armor and go out and form a phalanx. But in a siege, they were pretty much sitting around doing nothing much. Archimedes could have literally tens of thousands of people manning the mirrors, for free.
So the way I'd do it would be basically to get some thousands of people on the walls, and give each a mirror as his siege weapon. So we wouldn't be talking about keeping 100 mirrors on one ship, but literally as many as you can pack on the walls. Thousands.
And since each soldier only has one mirror to operate, full time, they can even track a moving ship.
From there it depends more on how you make them aim it. If they're just aiming a mirror and nobody can tell which spot is theirs, the accuracy is as good as none in a large group. If you have a good system that doesn't depend on guessing which spot moves when you move your window, it turns out that you can be pretty damned accurate.
Fortunately such a system has been shown to exist, and uses only simple geometry known at the time. You just need a flat mirror that's actually mirrored on both sides, and a hole in it. Preferably with a crosshair or some such, but if you're not going for accuracy even just a hole will do. You need it mirrored on both side so you can align it so simultaneously (A) you're seeing the enemy ship in the middle of the hole, and (B) you aligned the image of the spot of light coming through your hole with the hole.
At that point, if you had a perfectly flat mirror, you'd have your beam exactly on the enemy ship. With a more realistic metal surface available at the time, the usefulness would decrease with the distance.
But we're back to the point about having tens of thousands of people soldiers doing it for free. Even if one mirror at 1000 ft does diddly, ten thousand mirrors tracking the ship are a LOT of diddly.
So, yes, if you had a squad pointing 100 mirrors, yeah, at most you'd blind the crew. But if you had 1000 mirrors tracking the exact position of the ship, that would kill.
Especially remembering that in the end igniting wood is just an arbitrary point, but against humans you need far less to be deadly. I mean, sure, you need 300 Celsius or so to ignite wood. But even 100 Celsius will simply boil a human if they stay on that ship long enough, even if it doesn't ignite the wood.
Plus, as the recent pain ray experiments showed, at the point where your pain receptors say "burning", for the vast majority of people no amount of willpower will help. A hard reflex kicks in to get the hell out of its way at all cost. So put a big and hot enough blot of concentrated sunlight on that ship, and those guys could probably swear they're burning alive even if no actual flame happened. And jump into the sea.
Also if it helps, most trireme and quinquereme were not of cataphract (covered) design, or only partially. So when focusing sunlight from high above, a lot of people will be in its way, and, as I was saying, a lot more vulnerable than the wood.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Its not a 'death ray' until someone dies.
How is any of this newsworthy? A kid glued mirrors to a pre-built frame. Not that impressive. Nor is the writeup - "Concentrated solar power has the potential to generate immense amounts of energy..." Uhh, the energy is already there, folks. It's just, you know, concentrated.
Jesus, on *this* planet at *this* point in history and *this* story has "air play"?
What a friggin' lame view of a culture.
5000 suns? I mirror does not a sun make!
I'd like to see him barbecue his pesky little brother. (Now that would be entertaining. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Maybe putting a skylight on the shed wasn't the best idea after all
But not as impressive as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0_nuvPKIi8
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
You can if you know the enemy must pass through a specific area, like when they sail into a harbor. Then you just aim at where they have to pass through... I don't care what Adam & Jamie said, the sun's putting out lotsa power, and it can be focused. The question is whether they, in ancient times, had smooth enough, clear (efficient) enough mirrors, or enough of them to overcome the lack of efficiency. If you had reflectors that only operated at 50% efficiency, on a bright sunny day, and you could aim them reliably at a point, and had say, a square mile of them, you could melt ROCK with it, I would think. I don't know the amount of power the sun puts out on the Earth in Greece, or what time of year... but I'm sure it could be figured out by trial and error, if you had to. OTOH... as soon as word got out, the enemy would simply attack only on cloudy days, or at night. HOWEVER, what if they could re-aim them at a big bon-fire? Maybe history has it wrong, and the point of the mirrors was to BLIND, not burn. In such a case, even a big bonfire could work. If the sailors on the enemy boats were unable to see, they could then blast the boats with flaming pitch from catapults, or whatever, or just hose them down with something flammable using high-pressure monitors, or maybe just flood the area through which they had to sail with oil, and set THAT on fire with the sun. Maybe they did that. OTO, OH, maybe they didn't use the sun at all. What if they used a bonfire, and the mirrors were for focusing not visible light, (although they doubtless used that for aiming) but instead was for directing IR? They didn't have to know what IR was to know fire was HOT!!!
You divide the surface area of the reflector by the size of the focused area. If you can get a million mirrors all aimed at the same tiny spot then yes, it's a million times hotter.
Doing it would be quite challenging technically but the math doesn't lie.
No sig today...
If you watch to the end of the video, you learn the device was "mysteriously destroyed in a burning shed." Hmmm.
I wonder if they could make like one of such concentrators. Then multiply them endlessly in wide circle, miles wide, all focusing on just one spot and like, fuse freaking hydrogen.
That would kick so much ass.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
I notice he didn't try to obliterate a mirror with it :)