“A few years ago a storm flooded the local water treatment facility leaving me and all my neighbors without water for several weeks.
Partially motivated by this I designed a portable solar powered water distiller. The idea is that a person adds water from any source (assumed to be dirty, salty or otherwise unfit for drinking) in one side and over the course of the day gets clean safe drinking water out the other side.
At the heart of this design is an innovative method for forming a medium size parabolic mirror using a flexible aluminized mylar sheet (the shiny metallic foil commonly used to make potato chip bags/decorative balloons). I built an aluminum frame, using 1 inch wide by 1/8 inch thick strips, that runs around the edge of the mirror and use a pair of wires at either end to draw the frame up into a parabola.
The mirror is actually sandwiched between an upper frame and a lower frame. This mylar sheet, frame and wire construction makes a good parabola, is inexpensive, lightweight, and can be easily assembled/disassembled…”
