With temperatures warmer then ever, an artificial sun doesn’t seem like the first thing we need. German scientists on the other hand hope to develop a sun simulation that will not give us only daylight, but also carbon neutral fuel to power our needs.


With 149 souped up film projector spotlights installed in one big composition the Synlight research project looks like a huge artwork. Besides that, it produces 10.000 times more intense sun light than our old natural sun. On its peak, the installation can reach temperatures up to 3,5000C. Bernard Hoffschmidt, research director at the German Aerospace Center says “If you went in the room when it was switched on, you’d burn directly”. Exactly this concentrated heat could be used to trigger a reaction to produce hydrogen fuel by extracting hydrogen from water vapor. After being extracted it then could be used for instance as fuel for cars or airplanes.


At the moment the sunlight experiment is set up in an special reactor near Cologne, Germany, and uses in four hours the electricity of a yearly four-person household. Scientists believe this is the right track on finding out how hydrogen is produced in an carbon neutral way. So we can keep up with the power we put in our electricity to sustain our lifestyle. Until now a lot of this power comes from unsustainable methods of producing the fuel, leaving the next generations with waste of production and even more polluted old nature. So lets hope the artificial sun will help us to use our old one with better means!


Source: The Guardian

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