SRC-592

GB 2571383 A: Solar concentrator. UK patent application no. 1812844.7, filed 07.08.2018, priority GB 1802849 of 22.02.2018, published 28.08.2019 (as printed on PDF 1)

Commissioned by UK Intellectual Property Office. Who paid for a study is recorded because it bears on how its conclusions should be read, not because it makes them wrong.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-1185 The top-power version uses two pairs of curved mirrors, one pair at each end. Each pair doubles the sunlight and turns it sideways into the stack, so the stack gets four times normal sunlight in total. The patent gives the best mirror tilt for each pair's own concentration. It works this out for a pair that concentrates in two directions: about 16.5 degrees for a doubling, and about 11 degrees for a single pair that quadruples the light. The four-times system itself is built from a simpler kind of pair that concentrates in one direction only, and for that kind the patent gives mirrors tilted at 22.5 degrees.
• CLM-1186 The patent describes an existing kind of solar collector whose layers step up like a staircase, with risers that can be panels that shed heat; it does not say its own helical design has such risers. In the helical design the rows are typically 14 millimetres apart, and the whole thing may be hundreds to thousands of metres across and tall, so it has many thousands of rows.
• CLM-1187 The middle of the collector, a tenth of its area seen end-on, has no solar cells, so the mirrors have a hole in the middle rather than reflecting light that would be wasted. The hole's radius is about a third of the mirror's radius.

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