June 5, 2021

A research facility in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, has built Synlight, an artificial sun intended to develop production processes for solar fuels, including hydrogen.

The system consists of 149 Xenon short-arc lamps focused on an area of 20 x 20 centimeters in a 3-story building. Synlight’s 350-kilowatt array produces radiation 10,000 times more intense than natural solar radiation on the Earth’s surface. The temperatures at the target point of the lamps -up to 3,000 degrees Celsius- can be used to manufacture fuels, including hydrogen.