Might not be much of a production line. Very big, very slow, sensitive to weather conditions. What do you do about all the scattered light? The guy in the picture is wearing goggles, but people in the building who see the crucible (while looking out the window) won't be.
timmaxw|3 years ago
I think it's actually fine. Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:
- The lens collects about 1 m^2 of sunlight.
- At the focal point, the concentration is way higher than sunlight.
- But when the light is scattered away from the focal point, it's distributed over an area of ~4 pi R^2.
- So from the point of view of a person looking out the window, R^2 would be much greater than 1 m^2, so the crucible would be less bright than the outdoor sun.
- The outdoor sun doesn't blind people unless they look directly at it, and humans are good at avoiding that.
So I think the crucible would appear as an annoying glare that people would instinctively look away from, but it probably wouldn't accidentally blind people.