Thread: How to make your own fat optical fiber for solar device?

I'm prototyping a solar energy device, and need to transport a concentrated light beam a couple of meters without loss or, ideally, burning anyone's hand off.

I was thinking of some kind of 'total internal reflection' medium, such as glass, but it needs to be cheap and easy to make/find, and it would be great if it had at least a little flexibility.

Is there any way to make your own? Some kind of gel, or crystal, or maybe water if it wouldn't attenuate or absorb too much of the energy?

Failing that, is there some existing material I could wrench out the back of something?

Cheers,

Daniel.

would fibre optic cables work?

There's a couple problems with using off the shelf fiber optics:

They're kind of expensive and hard to come by, the main point of this project is to make a solar device which is as cheap and easy as possible to construct, mainly for use in the developing world.

They're too thin, the light beam in question will probably be about 10 cm2. I can stack a bunch together but it would be inefficient with all the little gaps in between.

They'd probably melt, as this light beam will be somewhere in the hundreds of degrees, hopefully more.

But other than that, yes they'd be perfect. They're bendy, fairly resilient, and low loss, which is what I'm after.