Scaled generations of all-glass, glass-making solar furnaces

Specifications for scaled generations of all-glass, glass-making solar furnaces.

A classic science-kid's demonstration is making glass from sand with a solar furnace, and, in fact, the glass-making capacity of a solar furnace is prodigious. A solar furnace of any size, even if it is 100% glass, can make all the glass needed to replicate itself in a matter of weeks. The glass replication time of a small backyard solar furnace may be only a matter of days. More likely at large scale, the glass for a furnace would be produced by a smaller solar furnace that produces at a rate that does not outstrip the capacity to fabricate and assemble glass parts. That smaller furnace, in turn, may have been made by an still smaller furnace; and so on, through multiple generations of scale.

Starting at a very big scale (a solar furnace on 9 square miles of land) and working for the most part within areal units of the Public Land Survey System of the western United States, the table above shows specifications for six scaled generations. If these calculations can be taken seriously, the time from the completion of the room-sized 9-square meter furnace to the completion of its descendant quarter-township furnace is 6.3 years.