Solar Engine Application by Using Concentrated Solar Energy

Abstract

A prototype of solar (heat) engine that has been developed and demonstrated in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) is an adoption of modifying a commercial internal combustion engine into a Stirling engine driven by concentrated solar energy. The system which consisted of a new proposed rotation-elevation tracking mode heliostat – mechanically designed and developed for sun tracking and a computer designed optical receiver – fabricated multi-fold cones with mirror arrays to further concentrate of the sunlight, are specially developed for this experiment. In this paper, the development and feasibility test of the solar engine system will be reported. The 0.59% of overall  efficientcy from solar energy to mechanical work produced in this experiment also will be discussed.