5. 2 Outline of a Production Process for the SSPS Rectenna A logical revision of the design of the core structure shown in Figure 5-3 lends itself to a high speed fabrication method which starts out with rolls of flattened wire and insulation material as suggested in Figure 5-4. The wire is rapidly and continuously formed into the side rails of the core structure. These side rails double as microwave transmission lines and busses for collecting the DC power. The two side rails flow together and are fastened to each other in such a way as to form the needed capacitors and the inductive sections of line. The diode is also incorporated at some point. This core-assembly flows continuously together and then the metal shield flows around the core assembly as suggested in Figure 5-5^ and is joined together in some manner. (Note the form of the field in the assembly of Figure 5-5 was an earlier variant). The material from which the shield is fabricated is as thin as possible consistent with the strength that is needed for structural purposes. At this point of development, the subsequent production assembly methods have not been defined, but one can imagine the output of many fabrication machines flowing out over a reflecting plane made up of wire mesh and being joined to it. The reflecting plane in turn is joined to a supporting structure as suggested in Figure 5-1, The entire prefabricated assembly then rolls off the back of a continuously moving factory such as that shown in Figure 5-6. In this advanced concept materials are hauled into the front of the moving factory and the finished assembly flows out the back. An alternate approach to the moving factory is a fixed factory at the site of the rectenna; in this case the finished rectenna sections would be hauled to the site by specially made trucks. However, the argument for the moving factory is that continuous lengths of rectenna several hundreds of meters long will be needed; this would complicate the hauling process. In any event, some high-speed, on-site production method will be necessary because of the large scale of the SSPS rectenna as indicated in Table 5-1. Because of the economic desirability of fast erection of facilities, it would probably be desirable to install a complete rectenna in about one year's time. This means that for a rectenna with ten billion elements the rate of production of rectenna elements would be about 318 per second in order to construct the rectenna within the 8760 hours of a year's time. If the rectenna panels were 6 meters wide the moving factory would have to move at the rate of 0. 265 meters per second to cover the area with rectenna panels in one year. Undoubtedly the use of more than one machine would be found to be cost effective. There are a number of changes that will have to be made in the present core-assembly design in order to make it more compatible with a low material cost and high speed assembly. The use of teflon machine screws, nuts and washers to form the capacitors and to hold the structure together is of course incompatible both from a cost and assembly point of view. An alternate approach
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