Get up close and personal with the Big Dish at ANU on Sunday 26 August
This ‘talk and tour’ event forms part of the 2018 ANU Open Day ANU Immersion Sessions. You’ll have a chance to hear from Dr Coventry, an engineer experienced in development and commercialisation of solar technologies and from engineering student Samuel Palmer.
The ANU Generation II Big Dish solar concentrator is the world’s largest paraboloidal dish solar concentrator, with 489 m2 of mirror aperture area. At the focal plane it produces an average concentration of 2,100 suns over a disk with diameter 530 mm, and a peak concentration of 14,000 suns. Construction of this facility was completed in June 2009, and it first generated steam on sun in July 2010. The Generation II Big Dish was developed and built by ANU in collaboration with Canberra-based company Wizard Power, with support from an AusIndustry Renewable Energy Development Initiative (REDI) grant.
This dish is a prototype of a design that is intended for use in large scale solar thermal power generation systems, where large arrays of dishes are joined to feed energy to a central power generation plant. The ANU prototype is used to obtain experimental data supporting investigations into energy conversion processes, to seek design improvements and to support efforts to license and commercialise the technology.
We have two sessions available but be quick, resgistrations are limited!