Basically I have wondered this for a while... The sunlight can be concentrated to the point it is incredibly powerful, but traditionally this is only at a focal point after which the light rays "fan out" again and there is no intense heat. What if I want the light to stay concentrated over a distance? Technically a fiber-optic like setup (B) should work to keep the light concentrated in the cylinder as long as it is sufficiently small in diameter, but as soon as the light exits the other end it would disperse again as the angles of the light rays stay the same and just reflect off of the cylinder walls. Is there some kind of prism, polarizer, or other component I could use to straighten out the light rays once they are concentrated by the lens?
How could I get the light to stay concentrated
Other urls found in this thread:
en.m.wikipedia.org
what-if.xkcd.com
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Sunlight has multiple wavelengths, phases, and polarization angles that interfere with each other. That's why we invented lasers.
Power a lazer using a solar panel.
Lol, that's the literal answer... but what if I can tolerate a little bit of light lost - is there a way to form a *relatively* tight beam that would stay a beam for say, a few meters? One meter? There are some big lenses like those made of TV components that produce so much concentrated light that even a 80-90% energy loss in a somewhat tight beam a few meters out would still leave a seriously hot beam.
The reason laser beams can stay concentrated is because the light is monochromatic, and in phase. Light from the sun would slowly diffuse because the different wavelengths interfere with each other.
Read this.
en.m.wikipedia.org
I'm not trying to make a laser though... just to keep the sun beams together for a short distance - just further away than right at the focal point.
A collimator would basically defeat the purpose of concentrating the rays down to a small point, unless they could be somehow otherwise set in generally the proper trajectory before hitting it, which is what I'm trying to do - to straighten out the beams on the other side of the lens, even if for just a short distance, at a higher concentration than when they go in.
go learn some EE senpai incident light from our god the Sun has many frequencies which means youd need to use a prism that somehow dynamically converts random incoming light to the correct vector which with nanoscale materials in a mobile solution might be able to do (quantum dots?) shits hard senpai and aka EXPENSIVE
Laser beams spread out over distance just like any other light source.
You can't do that with passive optics because you need somewhere for the entropy to go. You can power a laser with sunlight, though. No need to convert it to electricity first.