A hands-on laboratory experiment on concentrating solar power in a renewable energy sources course

At Hartnell Community College in Salinas, California, a renewable energy and energy efficiency course is a theory based course with several hands-on laboratory experiments. The course is designed for engineering and non-engineering students who are looking to transfer to a 4 year institution. Similar courses at 4 year universities, usually meet general education requirements. This course does not require any advanced mathematics or physics background. In order to enhance student learning in this course, we offered an additional hands-on laboratory experiment on concentrating solar power. The laboratory kit consisted of affordable and widely available materials that included 24 telescoping mirrors, stands, steel cup, thermometer, timer, and a cup of water. We asked the students to design, assemble, and test a central receiver concentrator with the goal to boil water contained in a steel cup. Upon achieving this goal, students were then asked to calculate the efficiency, define losses, and recommend ways of increasing efficiencies and therefore improving their systems through. The design challenge for the students is to determine the optimum position for the mirrors. Additionally, we asked the students to comment on the following; the effects of the time of the day and weather conditions, direct commercial applications, the process of generating electricity from solar concentrators. In order to record the level of improvement, each student was given the same questionnaire before and after completing the laboratory experiment. Upon grading the questionnaires, our assessment showed a 30% average on pre questionnaires scores and a 73% average on post questionnaire scores, suggesting a 43% improvement. This paper presents the results of our findings on performance improvements in further detail.