# Last edited on 2021-01-12 18:07:05 by jstolfi

Automatic opimization of solat heater by ray-tracing.

This project was inspired by a visit I got once from an old 
engineer from Peru, Remigio Lazo Franco, who wished to design 
a cheap rooftop solar collector which would let poor people 
produce distilled water.  

This project tries to design such a collector automatically
by adjusting the size and position of a 3D array of static flat mirrors
that concentrate sunlight onto a small boiler at the center. 

The efficiency is evaluated for a given sun position by ray-tracing the
collector from the sun's viewpoint, with the boiler painted bright red,
and counting the red pixels in the image.   Several such evaluations
are combined to obtain the quantity to be optimized.