Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An instrument in which a mirror is automatically moved so that it reflects sunlight in a constant direction. It is used with a pyrheliometer to make continuous measurements of solar radiation.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An instrument consisting of a mirror carried by clockwork in such a way as to reflect the sun's rays in a fixed direction. The name is also improperly applied to a porte-lumière.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun An instrument consisting of a mirror moved by clockwork, by which a sunbeam is made apparently stationary, by being steadily directed to one spot during the whole of its diurnal period; also, a geodetic heliotrope.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A device that includes a plane mirror which turns so as to keep reflecting sunlight toward a predetermined target, compensating for the sun's apparent motions in the sky. The target may be a physical object, distant from the heliostat, or a direction in space, and is almost always stationary relative to the heliostat, so the light is reflected in a fixed direction.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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According to the report, it features over 1,000 freestanding heliostat mirrors that follow the arc of the sun.
Concentrated Solar Power Tower In Seville, Spain: The Future Of Electricity? (VIDEO) Joanna Zelman 2011
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You also need to look at losses from suboptimal heliostat-receivers alignment resulting in further losses.
Solar Updraft Towers to Generate Food and Energy | Inhabitat 2008
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The Pit Power Tower design has heliostat fields on both sides of the pit and so you need two receivers.
Solar Updraft Towers to Generate Food and Energy | Inhabitat 2008
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He took a highspeed across the stony plains of the Piedmont to the heliostat terminus at Port Richmond, and caught the first flight out.
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Cover photos (clockwise from top right-hand corner): (1) Central receiver tower and heliostat field at Solar One, a 10-MW solar-thermal plant in the Mojave Desert, California, now under conversion to Solar Two, a central receiver plant with storage capabilities.
Chapter 1 1994
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The single largest cost component of the system is the heliostat field.
3. Solar-thermal 1994
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New stretch-membrane heliostats will also be added to the existing heliostat field to increase the system's energy output.
3. Solar-thermal 1994
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De Laquil and others (1993) use similar values for heliostat costs in their estimates.
3. Solar-thermal 1994
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With the telescope, micrometer, heliostat, and spectroscope came desire for more complex instruments, resulting in the invention of the photoheliograph, invoking the aid of photography to make permanent the results of these exciting researches.
Scientific American Supplement, No. 288, July 9, 1881 Various
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Images of the sun are thrown into the observatory by an ingenious instrument run by clockwork, and called a heliostat.
Scientific American Supplement, No. 288, July 9, 1881 Various
ecbrenner commented on the word heliostat
"An instrument consisting of a mirror mounted on an axis moved by clockwork by which a sunbeam is steadily reflected in one direction." --Merriam-Webster's Unabridged
March 27, 2009