> Using 38 to 42 of the 212 heliostats — mirror-like devices used to focus sunlight — at the thermal test facility, Ken was able to achieve a temperature above 900 degrees Fahrenheit uniformly across the roasting drum, he said. This is comparable to the temperature of a traditional propane chile roaster.
Your standard oven certainly isn't going to get to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. So maybe 90's drum cookers could roast things like chicken wings, but probably not chiles.
Not really a practical or serious technology at this time.
Most solar ovens can get high temps, but they require tradeoffs on scale or speed.
My grandfather was a farm worker. He would bring home red chiles from the fields and roast them in the sun on his roof. So my first reaction to this story was "what's the big deal?"
The smell sucks people in. Can’t do that on a web site - yet
You want to blister the skin so it peels off easily. That's the main goal, but a lot of flavor comes out of caramelizing / charring things during the process, as well.
If you cook things too much, the entire pepper just turns to mush.
Heating things up enough to blister the skin means that the inside is steamed in the process. You want to get it so that it's cooked, but will still hold up enough to be peeled and sliced.
Cooking them perfectly is a balancing act of distance to the flame and the cooking time. I always use the broiler on the highest setting. It takes a few iterations with every new oven for me to dial in the exact timing and distance. Ideally you want to char the outside, while retaining the "structure" of the pepper flesh - not too mushy, but still a little toughness.
It doesn't nearly compare to the complexity of a real hatch pepper, but being 3000 miles from Hatch NM, I'll take it!
They may have eliminated a lot of CO2, but the smoke could still use some attention! (You definitely don't want to get your head near there to see how the roasting is coming!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_Energy_Systems
The only thing that's really new in solar in the last thirty years is the steady progress of semiconductor physics and technology. All the rest of it just follows from "sun is large and hot" which has been known for a long long time.
If you build it large enough, though, it'll raise the temperature of the sun!
All a solar concentrater does is increase the rate of energy transfer between the object being heated and the sun. The hot side gets colder and the cold side gets hotter. The only thing driving this energy transfer is the temperature difference, so once the temperatures are equal there is no more energy transfer. If you make it really huge, the temperatures equalize faster. This can increase the equilibrium temperature of the object because it's also losing heat to its environment. Bigger mirrors push the equilibrium temperature closer to the temperature of the sun, but never exceed it. It doesn't matter that the mirrors focus the radiation, because mirrors are not directional. They work equally well to transfer energy from the object to the sun if the object happens to be hotter. Whoever downvoted me doesn't understand thermodynamics.