Hybrid Power Generation at Air University, Islamabad

Muhammad Hassaan is a 23 year old engineering student from Pakistan. For his final project, Muhammad and his two other teammates Zia Bakht Butt and Bilal Ahmad designed a hybrid solar and biomass power generation system. Part of their system was a solar concentrator, and they were looking for a simple and effective design to bundle sunlight.

Muhammad Hassaan, engineering student at Air University.

Solar concentration and solar thermal energy are not new themes at Air University, Islamabad. Students prior to Hassaan have been experimenting with solar thermal and even attempted to build a solar concentrator.

The old model, fabricated last year based on a different design, was an 8 feet diameter parabolic concentrator. The problem with this parabolic concentrator was that it wasn’t achieving its focus point. They used small mirrors as reflecting material, almost 200 pieces of mirror were attached to this concentrator. But due to the overly complicated design and fabrication errors, the concentrator’s shape was not a perfect parabola and its focus did not gather at a single point.

Muhammad Hassaan, Engineering Student at Air University, Islamabad

With GoSol.org’s Lytefire Stove model, Muhammad thinks to have found the perfect method to concentrate sunlight in an efficient and simple way. "Out of all designs that I’ve looked at, your system simply makes the most sense. "

The system is designed to be a hybrid: when the sun isn’t shining, biogas can be burnt to create heat needed to power a steam engine for electricity generation. The biogas system is designed by students Zia Bakht Butt and Bilal Ahmad, and the team is supervised by Dr. Syed Lehaz Ullah Kaka Khel from Air University, Islamabad.

Stay tuned for the next post in this sequence about spreading our technology with Free the Sun.