Solar death ray

Aim: make a 'death Ray'

Light reflection: some things reflect light, while others absorb light. Reflective surfaces include metal, glass and mirrors. Our aim is to make a death ray. A mirror like concave shape that redirects all light reflection to a single point.

When light reflects it reflect off the normal(right angle(90°)) meaning that if the light was hitting the metal at a 45° angle from the right, it would come off 45° to the left.

Concave Mirrors work because they have a smooth surface and a curved shape meaning all light that is hit will be centered around one spot. Creating a spot with lots of heat and light energy, which can already burn through paper if held for a short period of time.

Our goal is to creat a concave mirror out of lots of smaller squares. Because melting and making mirrors would not be the easiest thing to do in buskers, we've decided on the next best thing… Tinfoil. Although it has a great reflective surface it brings another problem that it is a pain to work with.

Learning curve: We took a while to try and get something to work. We've gone with 3x3 as the size for our cubes. After testing many different strategies or best outcome was to stick on a big piece of tinfoil onto a big piece of cardboard and THEN cut it into 3x3 cubes. We also have to be careful with how we hold/ put in place our tinfoil as it is easily malleable(like really badly) and we need a flat surface for the light to be projected in just one spot.

Then came productions, making lots of tiny squares untill we have enough of them. Once we have all of the we need to put them into a concave shape, one that has to be of a good depth to work.

Learning curve 0.2: the concave shape. We need to make the shape of a bowl but with a bit less depth. Our first idea we to take a ballon and paper mashai it too make a shape, for a small trial. There were lots of ideas we hand but our biggest problem was that we needed more of a bowl shape than a cone shape.

We figured that for our draft/idea copy. The not final one. We would just push a piece of paper against a ball and then fold it into shape. Our prototype just consisted of sticking tinfoil squares on curved paper. We used a Lazer pointer to reflect off the square and land in the same spot, which proved to be a struggle.