Sketchup for solar cooker design?

gaiatechnician · 12 Dec 2008, 23:26

I have been asking around recently for software to help people design reflectors for solar cooking. and several other people are very interested too.
In my case, I have made new "compound" parabolic solar cookers in September 2008 and I find it very difficult to show people the advantages of the compound parabolic design. Basically it has almost the performance and power of a parabolic dish without the danger. The parabolic dish can cause serious eye injury or fire because it concentrates light to a point. The compound parabolic dish on the other hand concentrates light to a ball shaped area (where you put your cooking pot and the light stays on the area for a specific length of time. This means you do not need to move the dish so often and you can leave it alone. With parabolic dishes you have to move them much more often.
Ideally the software needs to show how the light bounces off a surface and where it bounces too. Can sketchup do that? Also it needs some way of modeling the sun moving across the sky.
Once again. Is sketchup up to the task?
Other software that has been recommended to me is blender and trueface. Any thoughts on which of them might be better for this use?
Thank you
Brian White
BC Canada

Gaieus · 13 Dec 2008, 05:03

Hi Brian and welcome.

Answer to your second question; yes, SU can do sun animation by using scenes where in one scene the time is set say to morning while in the other one to evening. You can also set the transition time between them.

As for SU showing the sun rays - well, there is no native tool for it but I could imagine some plugin or maybe even a dynamic component which could move some lines representing rays about...

TaffGoch · 13 Dec 2008, 06:34

Brian,

The best I've been able to do, thus far, is static representations of select direct/reflected rays, using transparent colors:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=c63b8d66ebe146e5b2174b2fd0759d18

As Gaieus wrote, the sun-tracking feature of SketchUp is perfect for this kind of study. You can demonstrate hour/date changes, as well as the effect of changing the latitude/longitude for different locales.

Regards,
Taff