Solar Steam Structure Concept Animated

This animation shows how the basic Solar Fire P32 structure is put together. See the video to understand how the whole machine works in real life.

There is one important difference between this animation and the video, see below.

Difference with video: Steam Pipe

In the video the steam pipe comes out the top and extends diagonally down to the ground. Through there’s no fundamental physics problem with that set up (it does work), it’s fairly dangerous and impractical.

The steam pipe (in the video it’s a metal pipe flexing under it’s weight and not a flexible pipe) could break in the wind or for any number of reasons. Also, it’s fairly complicated to lower the boiler with the steam pipe attached to it and the ground.

The solution to this problem is to pass the steam pipe down through the central post and out the bottom. However, our original design still had the steam come out the top go around the boiler come down and do the same maneuver as the cold pipe, but we had problems with this setup. So the diagonal steam time was a temporary measure since we had already called a press conference.

Then I realized that we can just make a whole in the bottom of the boiler and pass the steam pipe directly through it all the way to the base of the machine. So this is what we did.

We accomplished this about a week later as seen in the photo below.