Solar hardening of steels with a new small scale solar concentrator

Concentrated solar energy has been widely used in heat treatments for more than 20 years. In this work a new concentrating system and the first experimental results in heat treatments are presented. The concentrator, named as “Double Reflection Fresnel Lens” is a low cost, small scale facility with a concentration factor of 1000×. It has very good features for making heat treatments, e.g. on steel samples. Surface and bulk hardening can be easily achieved with this new concentrator.