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    "headline": "Uzbekistan’s 22,790-mirror solar furnace once tested materials for Soviet defense industry",
    "description": "The Parkent furnace near Tashkent, in service since 1987, focuses sunlight from 62 hillside mirrors and has since switched from military tests to making ceramics for industry.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-08T15:54:00+00:00",
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    "articleSection": "History",
    "keywords": "Engineering, solar furnace, Soviet history, Uzbekistan",
    "articleBody": "Near Parkent, about 50 kilometers from Uzbekistan’s capital, 22,790 mirror facets throw sunlight at a patch roughly a meter wide. For its first years, that patch belonged to the Soviet defense industry. Rasul Akbarov of the Institute of Materials Science in Tashkent, which runs the site, writes that in Soviet times the furnace was the leading facility of the military-industrial complex for exposing materials and equipment to concentrated sunlight. It also developed advanced ceramics. After the Soviet era, he says, research turned from military to peaceful work: fireproof linings for metallurgy, engineering ceramics, parts for the oil, gas and chemical trades. A reflector 54 meters wide The layout is simple to describe. Sixty-two flat mirrors, called heliostats, stand in a checkerboard on eight terraces cut into a 13-degree slope, 1,050 meters above sea level. They follow the solar disk across the sky and bounce its light across to a single curved reflector 54 meters wide and 42 meters tall. That reflector squeezes everything into a technological tower at its focus, 18 meters out. Akbarov lists the furnace at 1,000 kilowatts of thermal power, with energy density up to 700 watts per square centimeter at the focus. His own model is more cautious. Using ordinary working assumptions (700 watts of direct sunlight per square meter, and mirrors that return 60 percent of it) he gets about 480 kilowatts and a peak of 506 watts per square centimeter. The arithmetic of 22,790 mirrors The headline number is a sum, and it checks out. Each of the 62 heliostats carries 195 facets, which makes 12,090. The curved reflector has 214 blocks of 50 facets each, which makes 10,700. Added together, the two surfaces come to 22,790 pieces of glass, each one needing to be aimed. The concentration works out just as neatly. Sunlight of 700 watts per square meter is 0.07 watts per square centimeter, so a focus of 700 watts per square centimeter is about 10,000 times the direct sun arriving at the site. Akbarov’s paper gives a concentration range of roughly 4,500 to 10,000. A French twin, and a disputed birthday Parkent has one close relative. France finished a 1,000-kilowatt furnace at Odeillo in 1970, with 63 heliostats and a reflector intercepting 2,000 square meters against Parkent’s 1,906. Reference works credit Odeillo with reaching 3,500 degrees Celsius. Parkent’s start date is less tidy. One encyclopedia entry says the complex opened in 1981, while the institute’s researcher says the furnace went into service in the summer of 1987. We use the institute’s date; the 1981 figure may refer to an earlier stage of the complex, but nothing we read settles that. Sunlight has one awkward habit as a heat source: it moves. Akbarov notes that the focal spot shifts through the day, and a modeled clear day at the site, June 18, 2013, held steady only from about 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Many high-temperature jobs need at least 600 watts per square meter of direct sun, so work is booked by season and hour. More than 150 oxide compositions have been developed and made there so far. A new mirror-control system has been tested on one heliostat, leaving 61 still to convert. Further reading Wikipedia: Solar furnace Image: Boyd Norton, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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