LET the sun shine in. Well, not quite the sun. This array of 149 silvery lamps is the world鈥檚 biggest artificial sun. It is housed in a three-storey lab at the German Aerospace Centre in Julich. The project is called Synlight.
Powerful lamps like these are normally used to project films onto a cinema screen, but that only takes one light. This array focuses its output on an area of just 20 centimetres by 20 centimetres. The intensity of light on that small patch is more than 10,000 times that of sunlight at Earth鈥檚 surface, and can create temperatures of up to 3000掳C.
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The heat is useful in energy-intensive fuel production processes, such as splitting water into its constituent parts to harvest hydrogen. This element burns without releasing greenhouse gases, which makes it highly desirable. But the usual methods of making it aren鈥檛 eco-friendly.
The Synlight project is intended to change that by helping develop methods of using sunlight to make hydrogen and some other types of fuel cleanly. Testing these methods requires a reliable and controlled light source. Sunlight in Europe can be unpredictable and hard to come by, yet Synlight blazes whenever you please.
Photographer
Michael Najjar, synlight (2017),
