Please consider putting english subtitles in your videos. It would make a huuuge difference for many watchers that know english quite well, but still may have problems with such science talks. BTW it's great that you respond to the recent events and do videos explaining them, it makes your channel subscribe-worthy.
There was a video somewhere from a company in France. They had a large reflector, I think 5 m in radius and it concentrated the light onto a 5 cm radius area. They were able to melt an iron plate in 30 seconds (mp = 1500 C).
There is a solar power plant in Spain which has loads of moving mirrors which project the sun on the top of a tower, where the heat is absorbed by liquid Natrium to the generate power.
Your profile picture is magnificent. As for the building: there is really not all that much that can be done about it. The Walkie Scorchie is nearing completion, and for the time being, the people responsible are only saying that the phenomenon will stop come autumn, but offering no lasting solution. Any solution they do come up with will most likely be an absurdly expensive affair.
it's a rare time i laugh out loud when i'm on youtube. the professor's story about the newspapers was one of those rare times. this gets a like from me.
The architect of the "Walkie-Talkie" building also designed a condo/hotel in Las Vegas called Vdara, which has the same problem! In this case, the sunlight was focused on a pool in the hotel grounds and it gave a few people some unpleasant burns. I'm amazed this guy was allowed to repeat his mistake in London.
Good question. I suspect they'll need to attach something to the reflective surface, perhaps shades over the windows or a coating on the windows' surface that scatters the light rather than reflecting it as much (though that would inhibit the view, so probably not that).
They were unable to easily light a wooden ship on fire using relatively small mirrors. That's very different from heating up a stationary object with a mirror the size of a skyscraper. It's entirely possible to gather huge amount of solar power in a very small volume using mirrors, check out "concentrating solar power plants" for more info.
In a flat surface, like the one in the video, yes. It makes more sense to think about it in other situations tho, like in the building(a spherical mirror) for example.
Awesome coincidence (that Prof. Merrifield could contribute such a nice story and background to this also quite interesting story about the Walkie Scorchie).
A static power tower works exactly on this principle. One was built in California in which a several hundred "heliostats" (3x3 meter motor driven mirrors) concentrate sunlight on a steam boiler. There were definite worries about blinding pilots and such in the immediate area of the plant. They definitely had some par-broiled birds who flew through a concentration of beams.The plant was decommissioned a few years ago, after working for 20 years. It's visible in Google earth at 34.8719, -116.8342.
There are several designs that focus solar energy & convert it to another form of energy. If you are interested you can search for Heliostat & solar furnace.
That's such a good yarn about the pigeons! I saw Anish Kapoor's exhibition in Sydney, including the sky mirror, and I thought that it must make astronomers very happy. BTW, you'd think that someone in the architecture firm that designed the death ray building would have picked up on what it would do
Thanks :) I agree, there's no really feasible solution to the problem. Rebuilding the building, though it would work, would be far to expensive to even consider. Although, I wonder if they might accomplish something by re-angling the windows so as not to be parallel to the curved surface of the building...
I was just about to say this. I'm glad someone beat me to it. Very good idea to put solar panels where someone's already focused the light, to cut down on the cost of building focusing mirrors in the first place. Especially if you can't park there anymore for fear of melting your car.
The Ivanpah solar power tower facility has "cooked" some birds mid-air. But of course that is a purposeful concentration of sunlight with hundreds degrees Celsius in the focal point.
THANK YOU! You said the rays from the sun were essentially parallel. I was told by my 9th grade science teacher that there were in fact exactly parallel. When I spoke up and said that wasn't right. I was told not to worry about it. I continued saying I could prove it (which is super easy to do even for a 14 year old). After proving it, I was promptly kicked out of class for the day. Thank you for getting it right even if its a bit harder to explain. Thank you, thank you.
Another thing that should have been pointed out is the location of the different focal points, in the case of Nottingham's mirror, it seems as though it's pointing slightly upwards mean people wouldn't be really harmed where as the building's focal point seems to point close if not spot-on to the sidewalk.
In Las Vegas there is a similar phenomenon at the Aria casino. The facade concentrates sunlight onto a pool deck, melting plastic bags and shoes. We call it the "Death Ray".
There's a hotel in Las Vegas with the same problem. I think they alleviated it by slightly changing the angle at which every pane of glass was mounted so that they didn't have as much of a single focal point.
At MIT, there's a building that was originally designed to have an atrium with a huge glass sphere in the ceiling. One thing about transparent spheres is that they focus all of the light that enters them such that it all goes through a single point, which would have been far off the ground. But the joke was that the building was so ugly that it would cause birds to burst into flames if they flew through. And then they decided to leave out the sphere when they built it.
The advantage of using the normal is, that the normal stays a straight line when you go from the reflecting line in two dimensions to a reflecting surface in three dimensions, while the tangent becomes a plane. In two dimensions it isn't that much of a difference, but that doesn't mean that the difference isn't important.
Dear Mike Merrifield and anyone else, Is there a way to design the angles of a surface so that it will allow minimal heat radiation to be absorbed. Such an idea might be applicable to car design, such as the angles of windows and even building windows, thus keeping a place in hot areas cool. I suppose in the winter you might not want this, but I would rather have to heat the car in the winter than cool down 160 °F (71.1°C) in the summer. I wonder if stealth technology might be useful for this?
+FlawllessCowboy If light is too concentrated at the focal point, the fine circuitry of the solar panel would melt, and the solar panel would be destroyed. What a bummer. However, there are solar power plants that use mirrors to concentrate light to one focal point, where they usually place a black container filled with water. That water will boil, and they will feed the steam into a steam turbine and generate electricity that way
+SuperSiggiboy If the concentrated sunlight was too intense for solar panels, couldn't you just put a convex lens in front of the panels to diffuse the light enough to spread over its surface?
It could be an art installation. The sun's lateral movement, like how it tracks back and forth across the sky as the year wears on, would cause the focal point to move left and right in an arc. So cut out that arc in the ground and have the collector move with the sun on tracks slowly through the year. It'd be like a giant solar clock, or modern Stonehenge.
Secondary reflector bruh. Actually wouldn't the diffuse light before the focal point be better for the solar PV? Larger area of light with less intensity.
Brilliant - according to the Nottingham Playhouse web site: "Contrary to media speculation Sky Mirror does not pose any danger to the public or pigeons in the form of a barbecue ray." nottinghamplayhouse co uk / about-us / sky-mirror
so if they cant calculate were the light is being concentrated couldn't you put the solar panels in that region some were and get direct light from the sun and indirect focused light from the building thus increasing power production ?
Could you link in the planning application URL or document? This would be a good lesson on law of reflection for high school students. I have been unssuccessful in searching for original planning application
They should used mirrored windows and make a solar thermal power plant out of the thing. Might even be a model for future buildings that double as solar power plants. Genius architect in retrospect!
You could also have talked about this ginormous solar furnace in France, where they have a ton of heliostats AND a concave mirror in the end, to get very concentrated sunlight. It is in Odeillo, so wiki it some time :)
It would melt too, solar panels have a major flaw in that they cannot utilise magnified or focused light energy due to the heat generated. However a liquid salt power system would work quite well, given the sun is shining in just the right spot :)
Probably not. Telescope mirrors have to be ground very precisely so that all of the light is focused at the same spot. If not all of the light is focused properly, the resulting image is distorted. This doesn't matter for simply concentrating sunlight, obviously, but for looking at distant stars and galaxies distortions are very bad.
Any form of reconstruction of even aspects of the building, including re-angling of windows, would probably be extremely expensive (and with some solutions ruin the facade of the building to an extent I believe the owners would deny, no matter how important). Another problem is that the building has already become a landmark and a symbol. Any changes should be subtle.
How do you mitigate this issue? Close the road in front of the building during february? Is it even allowed to reflect concentrated light from a building?
+djteac the Mythbusters tried to make a "solar deathray". They could cook with their revised version, but only if it was angled properly, and it's focal point was pretty close.
Wow. It's really interesting to learn an example of how an urban myth started. And it's not just speculation, it's guaranteed 100% true since you were the one starting it. Very interesting.
I remember reading about this building few years ago. I'm wandering what has happened to the building since? are there any more cases of burned cars or anything like that?
I wonder how they're gonna modify the building to prevent this from being a problem in the future. My guess is they will adjust how the windows are situated so they're perpendicular to the ground instead of following the curve of the building, resulting in a slight overhang above the windows but otherwise preventing the light focusing problem they have now.
especially because he has done it twice the same architect designed a hotel in las Vegas (now known as Death ray hotel) that caused hair being singed by concentrated sunlight.
well yeah, and in this case it is the same because the surface in the video is a flat surface, but had it been curbed it would have been hard to draw the angle of incidence and reflection unless you draw them between the light and the normal.
If I recall, those are called Parabolic Solar panels. I doubt it would get interest though, few people are interested in solar while many others associate them to the solar panels that are decades obsolete.
There already exist several power plants, called "Concentrated solar power plants" (google it), that work just like that, focusing the sunlight using mirrors and converting the heat into electricity. They are indeed often located in deserts :)
I am not an architect - my father, two uncles, and my grandfather are (and were). I'm totally amazed no one saw a potential problem with a concave building... I'd like to think I would have thought of that - I think i would have but apparently no one did :P
Because the sun moves about in the sky. So you'd have to constantly change the position of the solar panels. In Spain they have a different way of tackling this (look up solar tower spain).
Just a little input to Brady: The incidence and reflectiona ngle are not measured the way you did on the video. You don't consider the angle between the surface and the light, but the one between the light and the normal line
I don't think the light gets reflected because the windows aren't quite perfect. This is done on purpose, for insulation. It prevents the air inside the building from heating up too much.
According to wolframalpha, the pressure at the center of the earth is (1.35×10^8 to 3.68×10^8) kPa (kilopascals), a little more than a million atmospheres(!?!)... I'll check wikipedia... Wow, yeah, wiki says 3 mil. atmospheres, that's pretty crazy
The best quality glass will reflect as much heat as possible [while letting light in]. Buildings are expensive to air condition, and we want to keep that heat out.
+robermurpy1000g That depends greatly on the prevailing year round climate of the location. For a particular situation you must calculate both heating and cooling costs and adjust the design based on whether the sum of the two is positive or negative. Interestingly if all the flat (industrial type) roofs in warm climates were to be colored bright white rather than tar black the decrease in heat absorption would be roughly equal to the increases caused by all the CO2 emissions of automobiles. However this does not take into account the energy needed to produce, distribute, apply, and clean/maintain the white pigment but it is interesting to consider such levels of artificial albedo. I'm at 47N latitude and the year round temperature average tends to be about 11c and you can dig down a few meters in the soil and find close to this temperature year round. The depth and fluctuation of temperature in the soil are effected by local climates, moisture will tend to cause more conduction while very high rains can add large heat capacity as well as direct convection effects. None the less the soil some 10 meters down will strongly trend toward the yearly average surface temperature.
Thats a really interesting idea, this was an accident of design, but imagine a deliberate,thoughtful approach, you'd just need to make sure you don't cook the panels too much.
I'm fairly certain they were referring to the plastic parts of the car i.e. parts of the steering wheel, the dashboards, maybe parts of the engine. Of course the car itself didn't completely melt since metal has a very high melting point.
I'm just pointing out that I believe the "technical correctiness" is what we should be aiming for here. We know what he did serves its purposes, but I thought I'd warn everybody that the right way to do it would be different. I, for one, studied that and school and that simple detail could mean the difference between right or wrong in many questions crafted to get the student to do what he did.
I saw a news report saying the temperatures reached 50C in the area at one point! I don't see why they didn't use Anti-reflective glass for that building. Surely that would have stopped this heat effect of the suns reflection on the glass? Did no one know this was going to happen?
Thats the best urban myth ever! I can imagine someone like Karl Pilkington mentioning it...
"Alright? There's a pigeon death ray in Nottingham"
Please consider putting english subtitles in your videos. It would make a huuuge difference for many watchers that know english quite well, but still may have problems with such science talks.
BTW it's great that you respond to the recent events and do videos explaining them, it makes your channel subscribe-worthy.
I love how him saying that they are intentionally avoiding BBQing pigeons becomes "Pigeons Are Being Barbaqued" in the news.
the effect works for only 2 to 3 weeks of the years due to the sun positionr elative to the building
There was a video somewhere from a company in France. They had a large reflector, I think 5 m in radius and it concentrated the light onto a 5 cm radius area. They were able to melt an iron plate in 30 seconds (mp = 1500 C).
There is a solar power plant in Spain which has loads of moving mirrors which project the sun on the top of a tower, where the heat is absorbed by liquid Natrium to the generate power.
Your profile picture is magnificent.
As for the building: there is really not all that much that can be done about it. The Walkie Scorchie is nearing completion, and for the time being, the people responsible are only saying that the phenomenon will stop come autumn, but offering no lasting solution. Any solution they do come up with will most likely be an absurdly expensive affair.
troll level = professor
it's a rare time i laugh out loud when i'm on youtube. the professor's story about the newspapers was one of those rare times. this gets a like from me.
3:10 I believe in this case it would be called deathraytracing.
The architect of the "Walkie-Talkie" building also designed a condo/hotel in Las Vegas called Vdara, which has the same problem! In this case, the sunlight was focused on a pool in the hotel grounds and it gave a few people some unpleasant burns. I'm amazed this guy was allowed to repeat his mistake in London.
"Your car has melted. Please come and see us. From the builders"
Good question. I suspect they'll need to attach something to the reflective surface, perhaps shades over the windows or a coating on the windows' surface that scatters the light rather than reflecting it as much (though that would inhibit the view, so probably not that).
They were unable to easily light a wooden ship on fire using relatively small mirrors. That's very different from heating up a stationary object with a mirror the size of a skyscraper. It's entirely possible to gather huge amount of solar power in a very small volume using mirrors, check out "concentrating solar power plants" for more info.
I remember reading an article on the skyscraper and wondering to myself if Brady would make a video about it. And I'm glad you did!
In a flat surface, like the one in the video, yes.
It makes more sense to think about it in other situations tho, like in the building(a spherical mirror) for example.
Brady I would like to thank you for all your videos, Most of what you put up are somewhat related to what I'm studying.
Awesome coincidence (that Prof. Merrifield could contribute such a nice story and background to this also quite interesting story about the Walkie Scorchie).
yes - a few here on sixtysymbols and LOADS on deepskyvideos
A static power tower works exactly on this principle. One was built in California in which a several hundred "heliostats" (3x3 meter motor driven mirrors) concentrate sunlight on a steam boiler. There were definite worries about blinding pilots and such in the immediate area of the plant. They definitely had some par-broiled birds who flew through a concentration of beams.The plant was decommissioned a few years ago, after working for 20 years. It's visible in Google earth at 34.8719, -116.8342.
There are several designs that focus solar energy & convert it to another form of energy. If you are interested you can search for Heliostat & solar furnace.
That's such a good yarn about the pigeons! I saw Anish Kapoor's exhibition in Sydney, including the sky mirror, and I thought that it must make astronomers very happy. BTW, you'd think that someone in the architecture firm that designed the death ray building would have picked up on what it would do
Thanks :)
I agree, there's no really feasible solution to the problem. Rebuilding the building, though it would work, would be far to expensive to even consider.
Although, I wonder if they might accomplish something by re-angling the windows so as not to be parallel to the curved surface of the building...
I was just about to say this. I'm glad someone beat me to it. Very good idea to put solar panels where someone's already focused the light, to cut down on the cost of building focusing mirrors in the first place. Especially if you can't park there anymore for fear of melting your car.
The Ivanpah solar power tower facility has "cooked" some birds mid-air. But of course that is a purposeful concentration of sunlight with hundreds degrees Celsius in the focal point.
yes there are power-plants that use a large array of mirrors to heat water or oil so that the heat can be used to drive electric generators
THANK YOU! You said the rays from the sun were essentially parallel. I was told by my 9th grade science teacher that there were in fact exactly parallel. When I spoke up and said that wasn't right. I was told not to worry about it. I continued saying I could prove it (which is super easy to do even for a 14 year old). After proving it, I was promptly kicked out of class for the day.
Thank you for getting it right even if its a bit harder to explain. Thank you, thank you.
there was one of these archimedes rays in vegas due to a semi-circle shaped building. Locals called it the "Deathray"
+Daniel Cooper it was designed by the same failure of an architect.
Another thing that should have been pointed out is the location of the different focal points, in the case of Nottingham's mirror, it seems as though it's pointing slightly upwards mean people wouldn't be really harmed where as the building's focal point seems to point close if not spot-on to the sidewalk.
In Las Vegas there is a similar phenomenon at the Aria casino. The facade concentrates sunlight onto a pool deck, melting plastic bags and shoes. We call it the "Death Ray".
I live in the Netherlands and I had heard the barbecued pigeon myth. Nice to know the full story.
There's a hotel in Las Vegas with the same problem. I think they alleviated it by slightly changing the angle at which every pane of glass was mounted so that they didn't have as much of a single focal point.
At MIT, there's a building that was originally designed to have an atrium with a huge glass sphere in the ceiling. One thing about transparent spheres is that they focus all of the light that enters them such that it all goes through a single point, which would have been far off the ground. But the joke was that the building was so ugly that it would cause birds to burst into flames if they flew through. And then they decided to leave out the sphere when they built it.
What a fantastic channel this is. Great stuff.
Love this channel. As well as pretty much any Brady channel :)
The advantage of using the normal is, that the normal stays a straight line when you go from the reflecting line in two dimensions to a reflecting surface in three dimensions, while the tangent becomes a plane.
In two dimensions it isn't that much of a difference, but that doesn't mean that the difference isn't important.
Dear Mike Merrifield and anyone else, Is there a way to design the angles of a surface so that it will allow minimal heat radiation to be absorbed. Such an idea might be applicable to car design, such as the angles of windows and even building windows, thus keeping a place in hot areas cool. I suppose in the winter you might not want this, but I would rather have to heat the car in the winter than cool down 160 °F (71.1°C) in the summer. I wonder if stealth technology might be useful for this?
What if they put solar panels at the focal point
+FlawllessCowboy If light is too concentrated at the focal point, the fine circuitry of the solar panel would melt, and the solar panel would be destroyed. What a bummer. However, there are solar power plants that use mirrors to concentrate light to one focal point, where they usually place a black container filled with water. That water will boil, and they will feed the steam into a steam turbine and generate electricity that way
+FlawllessCowboy According to the Professor's diagram, the focal point is underground. But I get your point.
+SuperSiggiboy If the concentrated sunlight was too intense for solar panels, couldn't you just put a convex lens in front of the panels to diffuse the light enough to spread over its surface?
It could be an art installation. The sun's lateral movement, like how it tracks back and forth across the sky as the year wears on, would cause the focal point to move left and right in an arc. So cut out that arc in the ground and have the collector move with the sun on tracks slowly through the year. It'd be like a giant solar clock, or modern Stonehenge.
Secondary reflector bruh. Actually wouldn't the diffuse light before the focal point be better for the solar PV? Larger area of light with less intensity.
Brilliant - according to the Nottingham Playhouse web site:
"Contrary to media speculation Sky Mirror does not pose any danger to the
public or pigeons in the form of a barbecue ray."
nottinghamplayhouse co uk / about-us / sky-mirror
At which sun angle (or relevant days of the year) is the sunlight concentrated the most?
so if they cant calculate were the light is being concentrated couldn't you put the solar panels in that region some were and get direct light from the sun and indirect focused light from the building thus increasing power production ?
where can i buy a concave mirror?
Could you link in the planning application URL or document? This would be a good lesson on law of reflection for high school students. I have been unssuccessful in searching for original planning application
They should used mirrored windows and make a solar thermal power plant out of the thing. Might even be a model for future buildings that double as solar power plants. Genius architect in retrospect!
I read somewhere that it's a simple matter of putting a special film on the windows to reduce the reflectivity of the glass.
No, focal length = radius of curvature / 2. This means that for the building you would have to be within a 100m or so by the looks of it.
Someone will quickly be browsing UA-cam and will see a Sixty Symbols title "BBQ pigeons" and the legend will be reborn.
even if the parabolic mirror is on the north side.
just some more mirrors on the opposite side are needed to catch enough sunlight
Are there going to be any more videos from your trip to Chile?
You could also have talked about this ginormous solar furnace in France, where they have a ton of heliostats AND a concave mirror in the end, to get very concentrated sunlight. It is in Odeillo, so wiki it some time :)
excellent in all parameters
I remember actually seeing the ABC news story about the BBQ pigeons here in the states.
It would melt too, solar panels have a major flaw in that they cannot utilise magnified or focused light energy due to the heat generated.
However a liquid salt power system would work quite well, given the sun is shining in just the right spot :)
You guys rock! Thanks for the entertainment and knowledge...
Scientist: sculpture might hurt pidgeons. News: DEATH STAR IS REAL, SUPER POWERFUL DEATH RAY INVENTED
Probably not. Telescope mirrors have to be ground very precisely so that all of the light is focused at the same spot. If not all of the light is focused properly, the resulting image is distorted.
This doesn't matter for simply concentrating sunlight, obviously, but for looking at distant stars and galaxies distortions are very bad.
Any form of reconstruction of even aspects of the building, including re-angling of windows, would probably be extremely expensive (and with some solutions ruin the facade of the building to an extent I believe the owners would deny, no matter how important).
Another problem is that the building has already become a landmark and a symbol. Any changes should be subtle.
How do you mitigate this issue? Close the road in front of the building during february? Is it even allowed to reflect concentrated light from a building?
Aha, that's fantastic, having your own urban myth is awesome.
+S4R1N its not a myth, this really happened. And his building ins las vegas was responsible for burned skins and melted plastic cups.
+djteac the Mythbusters tried to make a "solar deathray". They could cook with their revised version, but only if it was angled properly, and it's focal point was pretty close.
Well, now he can cross that out of his bucket list. The guy's quite the legend; creating his own urban myth. XD
Wow. It's really interesting to learn an example of how an urban myth started. And it's not just speculation, it's guaranteed 100% true since you were the one starting it. Very interesting.
I remember reading about this building few years ago. I'm wandering what has happened to the building since? are there any more cases of burned cars or anything like that?
IngLouisSchreurs
i see what you did there :))
it's not my mother language, I do the best I can
I wonder how they're gonna modify the building to prevent this from being a problem in the future.
My guess is they will adjust how the windows are situated so they're perpendicular to the ground instead of following the curve of the building, resulting in a slight overhang above the windows but otherwise preventing the light focusing problem they have now.
why dont they make this kind mirror for the sun to focus for solar panels etc?
especially because he has done it twice
the same architect designed a hotel in las Vegas (now known as Death ray hotel) that caused hair being singed by concentrated sunlight.
They are already doing this in spain.. well heating up molten salt. But the concentrating sunlight part.
well yeah, and in this case it is the same because the surface in the video is a flat surface, but had it been curbed it would have been hard to draw the angle of incidence and reflection unless you draw them between the light and the normal.
Talking about reflected light, just how many rainbows can there be in ideal conditions?
If I recall, those are called Parabolic Solar panels. I doubt it would get interest though, few people are interested in solar while many others associate them to the solar panels that are decades obsolete.
And it tells you something about how news reporters (or their editors) deal with things.
There already exist several power plants, called "Concentrated solar power plants" (google it), that work just like that, focusing the sunlight using mirrors and converting the heat into electricity. They are indeed often located in deserts :)
This was an awesome video. :-D
I'd heard the BBQ pigeon story before! I never knew my old professor started it though...
I am not an architect - my father, two uncles, and my grandfather are (and were). I'm totally amazed no one saw a potential problem with a concave building... I'd like to think I would have thought of that - I think i would have but apparently no one did :P
LOL! Loved the pigeon story! Thanks :)
Could this be used to increase solar panels power production?
Because the sun moves about in the sky. So you'd have to constantly change the position of the solar panels.
In Spain they have a different way of tackling this (look up solar tower spain).
It would have been good to mention the application of geometric optics to produce energy like the PS10 solar power plant for example
Just a little input to Brady:
The incidence and reflectiona ngle are not measured the way you did on the video.
You don't consider the angle between the surface and the light, but the one between the light and the normal line
I don't think the light gets reflected because the windows aren't quite perfect. This is done on purpose, for insulation. It prevents the air inside the building from heating up too much.
So why are solar panels flat? Wouldn't it be cheaper to focus the light with a concave mirror onto a smaller solar panel?
According to wolframalpha, the pressure at the center of the earth is (1.35×10^8 to 3.68×10^8) kPa (kilopascals), a little more than a million atmospheres(!?!)... I'll check wikipedia... Wow, yeah, wiki says 3 mil. atmospheres, that's pretty crazy
Please Brady, do a video about the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment!!!!
The best quality glass will reflect as much heat as possible [while letting light in]. Buildings are expensive to air condition, and we want to keep that heat out.
+robermurpy1000g That depends greatly on the prevailing year round climate of the location. For a particular situation you must calculate both heating and cooling costs and adjust the design based on whether the sum of the two is positive or negative.
Interestingly if all the flat (industrial type) roofs in warm climates were to be colored bright white rather than tar black the decrease in heat absorption would be roughly equal to the increases caused by all the CO2 emissions of automobiles. However this does not take into account the energy needed to produce, distribute, apply, and clean/maintain the white pigment but it is interesting to consider such levels of artificial albedo.
I'm at 47N latitude and the year round temperature average tends to be about 11c and you can dig down a few meters in the soil and find close to this temperature year round. The depth and fluctuation of temperature in the soil are effected by local climates, moisture will tend to cause more conduction while very high rains can add large heat capacity as well as direct convection effects. None the less the soil some 10 meters down will strongly trend toward the yearly average surface temperature.
concentration point shifts over the year getting further in the winter and closer in the summer, also through out the day
This is exactly what I thought the tv news was missing from this story.
Is that an Olympic torch behind Mike's head?
Thats a really interesting idea, this was an accident of design, but imagine a deliberate,thoughtful approach, you'd just need to make sure you don't cook the panels too much.
The building also looks concave in it's width, adding to the vertical effect.
This is amazingly interesting...
AND
I wonder if the designer of that building got any flack for this...
Given that the normal is perpendicular to the surface, wouldn't that amount to the same thing?
The building had glass windows and only slightly concave wall though vs perfectly concave mirror.
I've seen that mirror many times when I'm in Nottingham, I had no idea about the myth!
you mean the inside of a metal bowl? :D i rather thought of a big mirror to scorch things :)
I'm fairly certain they were referring to the plastic parts of the car i.e. parts of the steering wheel, the dashboards, maybe parts of the engine. Of course the car itself didn't completely melt since metal has a very high melting point.
I'm just pointing out that I believe the "technical correctiness" is what we should be aiming for here. We know what he did serves its purposes, but I thought I'd warn everybody that the right way to do it would be different.
I, for one, studied that and school and that simple detail could mean the difference between right or wrong in many questions crafted to get the student to do what he did.
Reminds me of Ray Bradbury's short story The Stroke of the Sun (aka A Slight Case of Sunstroke)
I don't know about a test, but Adam has already made a Facebook posting about it!
Never been a fan of pigeon, but anything that is prepared is such an earth friendly way is worth trying.
Shades over the windows on the outside and/or some kind of a tent over the street high enough from the ground so the heat can dissipate.
I saw a news report saying the temperatures reached 50C in the area at one point! I don't see why they didn't use Anti-reflective glass for that building. Surely that would have stopped this heat effect of the suns reflection on the glass? Did no one know this was going to happen?
how long should i laid down to get an tan?