Butterfly Expo

March 31^st 2008

Today AMADER (the Malian Agency for Domestic Energy and Rural Electrification), the group who financed the development of the Butterfly so far, had a demonstration for a department of the Ministry for the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family. The object of the demo was to highlight the link between energy and the family. AMADER asked that I bring the Butterfly and Helios and do some cooking.

Here we are setting up the Helios on the edge of a soccer field. Once the mirrors started going up their curiosity got the better of them and they put the game on hold to come hang out while we set up the machine.

Some of the adults were concerned that the children would burn themselves with the Solar Fire, but teaching the kids some solar safety was easy, even if we didn’t speak the same language. The trick is to get them to put their hand in the focal point, but not at the point of most concentration. They exclaim and withdraw their hand, surprised by the heat. Then you get them to put their hand back in and slowly move towards the point of maximum concentration… they don’t get very close. Then you burn a stick and the message is clear.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to organize any baking of cake, but gathering the ingredients to make a nice pot of rice wasn’t hard. Note the rolling boil we’ve got going on. That’s about 5L of liquid and 1.5kg of rice, plus some veggies and beef.

The ladies from the ministry were mightily pleased. Two of the biggest advantages they see are time saved gathering wood out in the bush and improved cleanliness. Cooking on a fire leaves the pot all black and sooty, which dirties hands, clothes and dishwater while solar cooking leaves the pot as clean as when you started (except if you burn the rice, which we almost did…)

Now granted I’m a little bit taller than the average Malian woman, but the ergonomics of the machine are still quite acceptable for women here. Traditionally, cooking is done on the ground over a fire, and overcoming cultural inertia is never easy, but a number of the women we’ve talked to have said the equivalent of ‘so what if I can’t cook on the ground if I don’t have to go gathering/buying as much wood?’

Now we’re going to embark upon more expensive testing and fine tuning of the Helios bread oven as well as the Iron Butterfly designs.

Meanwhile, administratively things have stalled a little bit. I had left the association to do its thing while I do tech development but their follow-up on the contacts we’ve made has been less than satisfactory. I’ve put my hand back in the mix and we’ll see how things progress over the next couple of weeks, at which point important decisions will have to be made.

High hopes, as usual.

Boiled water

The first step to forcusing is determining where we'l place the mirrors. Since we're talking about inclined mirrors arranged on a flat surface there is bound to be some shading/blocking issues. Here, Djadje moves two mirrors around the wing and draws a rough guide to mirror placement so that we can space the mirrors effectively.


To space the mirrors effectively we--
Wait! Stop everything! Emergency! The teapot is broken! All work ceases and Michel heroically breaks out the oxy-acetylene torch and welds it back together. Phew. OK back to work, nothing to see here.


Using the mirror map we drill holes and place three screws in a broad triangle beneath each mirror. By placing a mirror on the screw-tripod and by varying the height of the screws we can incline the mirror such that it reflects onto the pot. You can see one mirror is on target while another is hitting the building.


Once we have all the screws properly adjusted (it's not enough to do it for one time of day, it has to work all day, so once you do the initial focusing you have to keep it on target for a day or two and observe how the mirrors react to different insolation (INcoming SOLar radiATION) angles and adjust accordingly.) we can proceed to backing the mirrors. I'd settled on styrofoam/glue mix. We bought a large quantity of styrofoam for next to nothing and got to work busting it down.


It wasn't the easiest process:


But it did the trick. The problem was how to weigh down the mirrors so they would stay in contact with the screws. For our first try we makeshifted a fast solution because the glue was drying fast:


Afterwards we reflected and determined that we could glue the mirrors and then tie them down using wire. We found out that wire worked so well we didn't even have to glue them.


That means that we could mount the wing and adjust the mirrors a little bit while we saw how they behaved on the machine. They behaved pretty well! We managed to boil some water, and we're at only half power! I assume we're at around half power, but you never know what ol' bucket-o-rocks is up to.


This bodes well for the final product, but the hardest part is yet to come.

The next step is to build the mold, and then use that mold to stamp out copies of our original. It will not be easy. Again, if anyone has any ideas about how to effectively make a very large mold of these mirrors let me know.

Geometry Achieved

Today was a wicked day.

Not only did I get a drive to work (instead of spending an hour walking and taking a packed van) but we basically finished the frame for the Butterfly (my variation on the Papillon) and proved the geometry is sound).

There were a number of problems that I had foreseen (weight distribution, pot placement, spaces between mirrors, mirror shading etc) and had assumed that we would be able to solve with a certain amount of elegance. Kudos to us for actually being able to.

Also, the butterfly is a test of construction precision, because unlike the other Solar Fire technologies, this one is pretty rigid. The Vesta, Apollo and Helios, however, all have movable mirrors and can be modified fairly easily. The butterfly is a one-piece reflector that must follow a pretty precise line of movement to track and reflect the sun easily. Initial indications… indicate… that we achieved an acceptable level of precision. Must be due to all the vicegrips:


And our counterweight (speaking of elegant solutions, note the paintbucket filled with rocks tied opposite the wing):

The butterfly works like this: the two wings face the sun directly, and will eventually be covered with 10cm by 10cm mirrors (like the one I'm holding)
which will reflect the sun onto the pot at the center. The paintbucket-counterweight will eventually be replaced by another wing, so the weight will be balanced. We've substituted that wing for a counterweight because I didn't know how this experiment would turn out and didn't want to make two wings if their shape/construction weren't for certain. I reverse engineered this design by looking at some pictures of the papillon, and so nothing was for sure.

The mirror angles at the edges of the wings are pretty acute, which means that we'll have to fill fairly large spaces with the woodglue/sawdust or Styrofoam mix, but luckily I happened across another type of plastic foam with better cohesion than Styrofoam, so we'll be able to cut it to fill the majority of the space without using large quantities of glue:
However well things went today, the process is nowhere near finished. Once the geometry is finalized, we move on to calibrating the mirrors. There are 100 mirrors to calibrate, which will take a solid amount of time (especially with the heat of the sun these days!). After the configuration, we'll have what we call a master mold. That is, we'll have glued all the mirrors at the proper angle, but in order to avoid having to calibrate 100 mirrors each time we want to make a wing we're going to make a mold of the original wing.

That's a pretty big mold. The parallelogram that makes the wing is short side: 70cm, long side 150cm and width 100cm. We're probably going to go for rebar reinforced plaster or cement (plaster is way easier to work with since it doesn't bond to mirrors too fiercely) but I don't know yet. If you've got suggestions on how to avoid breakage, let me know. I'm slightly worried, but have faith in the guys I'm working with. I don't have extensive materials experience, but they sure know their stuff. I'll let you know how we solve the problem (and the various ways we might fail).

Consider protocol disregarded (surprise surprise)

Monday morning and I 'passed by AMADER to say hello' and incidentally wondered aloud about the state of the financing 'because the SAHABA 2008 is only three weeks away'. There had been some motion, but still no money. They had received tacit approval to include the creation of the domestic solar cooker in their 'global budget' for SAHABA, but had not yet compiled the global budget etc. I said look, if I buy materials now will I be paid back? She said she couldn't guarantee anything, since it's not in her power, but given the tacit approval and the general enthusiasm of the department, I could pretty much count on getting paid back.

Good enough for me. To the truck! To the store! To action!

And by action I mean careful contemplation of the task at hand:
Here is the first little science experiment to determine how we are going to back the mirrors on the papillon. If you check a previous post, there's a picture of a papillon made with curved polished aluminum. My idea is to use mirrors attached to plywood. The question is how to support the mirrors at the appropriate angle. Here I'm mixing various quantities of wood glue and sawdust, or crumbled styrofoam with wood glue. The goal is to have something rigid, lightweight and cheap.

During the long lonely nights while the cyber is closed I amuse myself by contemplating the geometry of the papillon by drawing it out to scale on my bedroom floor:


The results are in! Styrofoam is much lighter and more waterproof, but sawdust is more rigid. More tests to follow, including other materials etc, but already we've got something workable for the demonstration.


Have you ever heard the saying that you can learn a lot about a workshop by the size of it's drill-press?


Basic geometry and initial structural problems overcome. Tomorrow we should start with the mirror focusing to make the master mirror mold. In an upcoming post I explain the process in detail...


Here's a picture of the Malian Minister of the Environment lighting a stick with Solar Fire:


And this evening the association Tile Tasuma (Solar Fire in Bambara) had it's first meeting. From left, President Ibrahim C Tomota, Secretary General Faguimba Tounkara, Assistant Vice-President in Charge of Training and Technology Djadje Samake, Vice President in Charge of Training and Technology Lorin Symington, General Treasurer Lalla Samake, Responsable de la sensibilisation (responsible for public relations, more or less) Boubacar Sidibe. Not pictured are Karim Sanogo who is Secretary in Charge of External Relations and The Accountant):


In summary: tech development is in full swing, hooray!

Chess, Life and Strategy

I should have studied at Josh Waitzkin’s Academy (Chessmaster 10) longer and harder. But I didn’t, I was too busy GOing in Cuba, GOing in France, and then GOing to Africa.

Things didn’t change too much when I got to Mali. I set myself on ‘linear GO mode’ (while building the Helios) to such a degree that once the objective (demonstrating/awareness raising) was completed I didn’t re-evaluate my line (being exhausted also diminished my analytical capacities).

Before the demo I had recognized the inefficiency of attempting to predict events after the demo, since so much would change, and so for mental convenience I settled on a simple line which was fairly obvious and low energy (meeting the ministers, gauging their enthusiasm to finance).

In Waitzkin’s Academy he teaches the necessity of recognizing what your opponent leaves behind when he moves. In life the opponent is reality (remove any negative connotation associated with the word opponent) and I failed to fully recognize what new opportunities emerged after the demo happened (reality moved).

This is because I pulled the noob mistake of not analyzing the new possibilities as fully as I could have (true I was physically exhausted and sleep deprived) and instead continued by following through with a line simply because I had set up for it.

Less abstractly:

Karim, Tomota, Lalla, myself and others conceived a goal: create a non-profit association dedicated to Solar Fire, and pursue the agencies able to supply the means to attain the goal Solar Fire International which is to promote ecological energy autonomy by creating a Research, Development and Training facility.

Lalla and Tomota are particularly insistent that all negotiations and efforts go through the association. They cite examples of government inefficiency and argue that the autonomy of being an independent organization will save us from getting mired in bureaucracy. These thoughts and their implications formed the basis of the line I was working on, which was linear towards getting a research, development and training center operational (the goal of promoting ecological energy independence is not compatible with GO mode, as it is an abstract guide for action).

The government agents were very impressed by the demonstration, but no meetings have happened to date. This is primarily because they have been out of the country, as the president has been on the road. Nobody’s fault, but not the speed and action on the project I would have liked to see.

Being stuck in linear mode for four or five days after the expo, I did little things to prepare for the eventual meetings: price materials, build a mental workshop and make lists of tools, personnel, space requirements etc.

I had vague feeling of inefficiency, but couldn’t see past the blinders GO mode.

Impatient, I figured I might as well see what AMADER (Malian Agency for Domestic Energy and Rural Electrification) was like. They approached me after the demo and told me that there was a Habitat Salon (SAHABA 2008) going on in Feb. and that if I could make a domestic model before then I could do an exhibition with them.

I got the go ahead to visit them. I did, and it turns out they are situated right beside the National Center for Solar and Renewable Energy. Within two hours I was touring the workshops with the directors of both AMADER and CNESOLER making a plan to create a partnership between our three organizations (AMADER supplies funding, CNESOLER supplies tools/workers and Tasuma Tile (Bambara for Solar Fire) supplies me. It was not official, AMADER still has to clear things with the president-director general, but they were pretty pumped and moving with a sense of urgency, since SAHABA 2008 is only a month away.

Pumped that the manpower and tools already exist for all the research and development I could want to do in the short term already exist, I fill Tomota and Lalla in on what went down. Their reaction was something along the lines of ‘ok Tasuma Tile will work with them for the domestic model since it is urgent and we don’t have the facilities to do it yet, but after that it’s back to Tasuma Tile running the solar show.’ I reiterated that I would work with whoever it was most efficient to work with. It was slightly tense.

That night I read a document that Eerik had sent to me. It was a breakdown of his strategy and a criticism of mine. The linear GO mode spell was broken, hopefully for the last time. It was refreshing like ice cold coconut milk (which is super refreshing and also nourishing).

Unconventional times, unconventional tactics.

Progress.

Work progresses adequately. Things have not gone as quickly as I would have liked, but that is primarily due to the lack of appropriate power tools. Additionally, a couple of the 'optimizations' I drew out in Google Sketchup 6.0 didn't work out as planned (note the picture below entitled surgery).


















However, in the timeline I envisioned, I took into account a number of mishaps of this sort and so we are not far off schedule. Here, Drisa (Diadie's apprentice) attaches a finished spider to the frame.












A spider is a small frame that we glue to the back of each mirror. Here are the spiders after we glued the spiders to the mirrors.


















The frame has eight 'arms' with screws at the end of them which permit us to deform the mirrors so that they approximate parabolas, yielding a focusing effect, seen here.

The balls of light you see between the mirrors are about 4 meters away, and are 10cm in diameter, while the mirror is a 30cm by 30cm square. In essence, each mirror focuses at 9:1 and there are 54 mirrors, so if we manage to focus perfectly we will have 486 intensities of the sun at the focal point.



Mirrors are not made to be flexed, though, and so some breakage is expected:


















Luckily, RV is on the case and he does his best to stay in the bounds of how much you can deform the mirrors.


Impatient for the oven to be finished, , Konan manages to roast a roast, Solar Fire style (even with only 2/3 of the mirrors mounted).

Meanwhile, Diadie 'makes with the oven':
Technology wise, things have slowed down a little with the making of the oven, as it is a precise process needing constant attention, so there is essentially only one working group. Compounding the slowness, RV has come down with some kind of illness and so has been out of action for two days. It's not too serious, but working all day in the sun requires a certain fortitude which he currently doesn't possess.

Politically, things are going well. The magical Tomota has done his thing, and has met with the Minister of the Environment to discuss the Solar Fire Project. The Minister is supportive and says he will 'accompany us, politically'. In real terms, that means he and his staff will attend our opening exposition.

The goal is to excite people as to the possibilities afforded by low tech solar power enough to create a research, development and training program which will develop technologies and train people how to build and use them to enhance their economic opportunities while promoting an ecological way of life.

Approx timeline: finish oven and any minor adjustments to the Helios concentrator by the 7th, have the array painted and pretty, set up at the Cite des Enfants by the 10th, commence preparations for the exposition and start actively promoting the technology on the 15th.

PEACELOVEHOPE

GOING.

RV and I get up at dawn, spend 10 hours a day at the workshop and then work on the computer until after midnight before sleeping until the pattern repeats. It’s working: I have anywhere from 1 to 7 people following my directions at any given moment in time when at the workshop. From the neighborhood children who sit around saluting us and chanting ‘toobaboo’ (whitey) at us while making us tea, to Diadié a shop man with impressive skill (it’s his workshop), his apprentice Drisa, RV, Konan, Yusuf (an economics student who wants to help promote the array) and a seemingly endless supply of interested randomers who have dropped by to lend a hand for the simple, long and repetitive work of making the spiders.

Today we finished the frame, and the mirrors have been glued up and ready for a couple of days now. Tomorrow is going to be a big and exciting day: we’re going to mount the mirrors, concentrate them, and start experimenting with local supplies for insulation (vermiculite and fiberglass insulation don’t seem to exist here). Next week, before Karim gets back on the 5th I hope to have painted the machine and built a hybrid oven/roaster, since two of the most interesting applications are bread baking and peanut roasting.

The real fun should begin then. For now, enjoy some pictures from around the workshop.

Proof that the solar arrays can be built just about anywhere:

Instead of giving the full explanation to every passerby (you never know who will be the vector that makes the connection to the precise person you want to talk to) I got the schematics printed up and I taped them to the wall of the ‘shop’ and they inform themselves, and if they’re interested (most are) they come over and talk it up.

RV at work slitting the spiders (if you’re interested in knowing more about the construction process, it is outlined in some detail at http://www.solarfireproject.com/spider )

Tea a la Mali is like teaspresso: they basically fill the teapot with green tea, fill up the between space with water, boil for half an hour, remove some water to add the sugar and then boil for another 15 minutes while pouring it back and forth ceremoniously. They then serve a half shot of it and you’re good to go for the next 45 minutes while 2nds gets made.

Here’s the jig we made to make sure the spiders get welded square (it’s important or else the screws fall outside the perimeter of the mirror and do nothing).

Work gets interrupted by Didier’s daughter; he gives her a coin and she goes to the corner store to get a candy (even though she can’t yet speak).

RV is good to go.

Didier isn’t impressed though:

By curving the main beam by weighting down the middle we’re able to weld some strap iron to make a tensor which strengthens the structure.

Warning: getting Bulldog glue out of the tube without the glue gun is surprisingly and amazingly difficult.

Headlamp to the rescue! We were able to glue up all the spiders.

On the way to work I stopped by the local bakery and found a bunch of jovial bakers willing to let me walk around and observe things. They didn’t speak to much French, but I got across that I was trying to build a bread oven and wanted to know how it worked. That’s not a wall behind them, that’s the oven. It’s over 2 meters tall by 3.5meters by 2 meters deep. It has two levels of bread and can make 240 baguettes measuring 80cm long at a time.

Finally we finished the frame. The mirrors are all glued up, and we’ve got a game plan for figuring out how to build the oven. Tomorrow, with the first sun of the new year we’ll light a Solar Fire.

Initial leaps

Due to time and logistical constraints (Karim's van and Pierro's vans leave tomorrow) we have purchased all major steel and mirror components for a Helios ( http://www.solarfireproject.com/thehelios) array (no doubt at slightly higher costs than would have been possible with more time, but orders of magnitude more convenient).

Note the nice clean T-shirt.

The Project is in very high gear.

Last night: strategy meeting with RV and the President, secretaries and Administrative council of FIMB-Mali, and Tomota, who seems to have a hand in just about everything. We are in general agreement that the plan is as follows: build a Helios ASAP, promote it at the highest levels permitted to us through pooling our (their) contact networks and solicit funding for a solar energy research, development and training (R,D&T) center, where my colleagues and I would explore all low tech (for now) solar technology options, while training others in the science of solar concentration as we build concentrators to distribute to eligible people. To this end, it was decided to call the director general of the Cité des Enfants, a ‘Ministry of the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family’ institution housed in a sprawling complex of buildings built to look like fairytale castles: All those at the strategy meeting knew him and agreed that Mr. Dembele was the man who could set this thing off with a bang. The Cité des Enfants has plenty of space to set up the unit for demonstrations and is a government institution, which will reduce the red tape for inviting government representatives and media to the unveiling of the Helios.

This morning RV, Lalla, Tomota and FIMB-Mali’s general secretary and I met with Mr. Dembele, who was astonished by the capacities of Solar Fire technologies. He said there were a half dozen solar cooking devices sitting in a warehouse owned by the ministry of energy, unused, because they were not worth the cost. He said it would be a pleasure for us to do the demonstration at the Cité, and said that it should be no problem for him to arrange for various Ministers (Energy, Environment, others) to be in attendance, as well as directors of various NGOs and institutions, plus TV, newspaper and radio reporters. When I asked him how much notice he needed to set up what he called ‘an inauguration ceremony’ with such attendees, and he told me three or four days. I said I’d be ready by mid January and he shook my hand and said he looked forward to it. He gave me his cellphone number and said if I needed anything he’d do what he could.

Afterwards I went and checked out the workshop. Lalla’s brother, Diadié, owns the place. It is rustic to say the least, but he has everything we need to build the array. It’s a good thing he has an apprentice who is basically a human hacksaw, because there’s no abrasive chop saw. There is a hand grinder and a hand drill and a table vise and some welders’ beams and we’ll be working in the street, since there is no space in the actual workshop (and it’s blazing hot in there).

Here's a picture of our workshop. It's kind of like a 'Where's Waldo?'