Solar energy is clean, abundant, and increasingly affordable, but it can also be fickle. Its availability changes with the seasons, and a single cloudy day can set back entire experiments. In other words, what scientists need is a controlled environment, and that's exactly what Synlight offers: the largest artificial sun in the world. With 149 lamps, three thousand degrees at its hottest point, and a goal of turning solar energy into fuel.
Many politicians still dream of fossil fuels and old dollars that aren't coming back, but the world is increasingly convinced that its future is solar, wind, geothermal... alternative. One of the big questions experts ask is how we can store and/or convert all that energy more efficiently. In the case of solar technology, the options with the greatest potential are two: hydrogen production and photochemical reduction of carbon dioxide. Hydrogen is created via electrolysis, and if we find a way to introduce the Sun into the process, it would be fantastic. The challenges are great, starting with the fact that the weather doesn't always help, but the response from the German Aerospace Center was decisive: build the largest artificial sun on the planet.
Meet Synlight, a system with a beehive configuration located in Jülich, thirty kilometers from Cologne. The 'solar simulator' is made up of 149 short-arc xenon lamps, concentrating their light onto a square of just 20 by 20 centimeters. As a reference, one of these lamps is enough to light up the screen of a large cinema, and when they are all activated, the target reaches a temperature of 3,000 degrees Celsius, receiving ten thousand times the solar radiation that reaches the Earth's surface. The total consumption of the lamps amounts to 350 kilowatts.
Researchers can use that temperature to manufacture different fuels, but hydrogen seems to be the priority. Remember that it burns without producing carbon dioxide, and despite its volatility, it will be a key piece in the development of alternative sources.
