LUNENBURG — At the water’s edge of a 119-year-old boatyard in Lunenburg, engineers are perfecting a surprisingly simple method of harnessing the sun’s energy to melt metals.
The Prometheus Project uses an ordinary mirror — albeit quite huge at five metres square — that bounces the sun’s energy onto a smaller mirror that then directs it into a crucible where it melts a lump of aluminum at 660 C.
Inventor Peter Kinley said the groundbreaking results have astonishing potential for the industrial and residential sectors. It can be used as an environmentally friendly way to melt metal and to heat water to warm houses.
"It’s a good time to look at renewables."
With the high cost of oil, it is expensive to melt the metals the foundry needs to create parts for boats and ships, and burning oil hurts the environment. Kinley wanted to find a way to concentrate the sun’s energy and harness it to melt metals.
This invention started out as a little experiment four years ago behind his farmhouse in Lilydale, just outside Lunenburg.
"We wanted to find a renewable source of energy for the foundry, something that was able to give us a reduction in costs over our current methods and that was sustainable and long term," said Kinley, president and CEO of Lunenburg Industrial Foundry & Engineering Ltd.
The folks working on this solar furnace, with its patented Kinley Dual Mirror System, are usually refurbishing boats — from Theodore Too to the Bluenose II and luxury yachts. But Kinley said it’s an ideal setup for his invention — he has the carpenters, electricians, plumbers and welders he needs to refine the technology, as well as the space to store the contraption in a huge boat shed.
His first prototype, Alpha, was rudimentary, using polished stainless-steel sheets inside plywood casing.
"I was surprised at how well our system worked from the get-go. We were able to melt metal the first time out."
It generated a temperature of 407 C, melting a metal called babbit, which is made from lead and zinc.
He called the National Research Council the next day to see who else was studying such technology and was shocked to learn no one was in Canada or anywhere else in the world.
His team has been refining that original prototype a little more each year.
"We decided to find a way to inexpensively duplicate what a magnifying glass would be able to do on a much larger scale," Kinley said.
With his initial success, he knew he had something big on his hands, but he didn’t want word to get out before he patented the design. So he dubbed the project Prometheus, for the Greek mythological character who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to people.
"Prometheus is a name that we adopted as a code word for the project because our patent attorneys advised us to keep it under wraps until the patenting process was complete. So the name sort of stuck."
Instead of telling people he was working on a solar project, he would tell the curious he was working on Prometheus, and they just assumed it was a boat.
As the foundry tweaks its invention, it has been working with Dalhousie University in Halifax to create a computer model of the temperatures the current system, Gamma II, has generated.
It has reached recorded temperatures of 1,800 C, although Kinley suspects it gets far hotter, even though it hasn’t been proved yet because the Gamma II has melted the platinum thermocouples that were used to measure the temperature. They can withstand temperatures of 1,755 C. There were signs of vaporization when the Gamma II melted iron recently, and that happens at 2,800 C.
As the Prometheus team continues to refine the Gamma II so that it can melt larger amounts of metals, and do it safely, a smaller version is undergoing six months of testing by Alberta Innovates — Technology Futures, the former Alberta Research Council, in Edmonton.
The foundry is looking at the potential to commercialize the Gamma II by making it more automated and to provide solar heat in houses by heating water that passes through pipes.
Kinley said he would also like to work with a university doing research in high-temperature physics.
In the short term, the foundry plans to use the Gamma II to create all its smaller castings, such as decorative door knockers, souvenir dories and Bluenose II replicas, by this summer.
"It’s completely carbon neutral, and we’d also like to increase the amount of metal it melts to displace our regular forms of melting."
Source: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Business/1185215.html
