[en] The thermodynamic solar energy is the technic in the whole aiming to transform the solar radiation energy in high temperature heat and then in mechanical energy by a thermodynamic cycle. These technic are most often at an experimental scale. This paper describes and analyzes the research programs developed in the advanced countries, since 1980. (A.L.B.)

[en] This paper considers the development process used to select the shield/antenna material satisfying the design requirements of the Solar Probe mission that will encounter a flux of 3000 suns at perihelion. A joint U.S. - French testing program was devised that would screen samples of carbon/carbon to determine the fabrication process that would produce the best thermal-optical and thermal-mechanical properties, lowest mass loss, and acceptable RF properties for temperatures up to 2400 K during shield operation. The U.S. testing program relied on three facilities to measure thermal-optical properties, emissivity, and mass loss. The facility for optical property testing consisted of a high intensity halogen lamp whose beam passed through a window in a vacuum chamber containing the sample. As the beam intensity was increased, the increasing temperature of the sample was measured by contact thermocouples for various angles of incidence.

[en] Various methods have been explored to produce fullerenes and carbon nanotubes but, the most attractive is the vaporization of graphite under inert gas atmosphere. Different possibilities are used to induce carbon vaporization, one of them been the high intensity of concentrated solar radiation obtained with the Odeillo solar furnace facilities. The first experiments done in 1993, (both in the USA and France) have shown that we can produce C₆₀, C₇₀ and higher fullerenes by the solar route. But the large scale production of these material with high yield and selectivity is still a real problem which reduce the development of the practical applications. The solar approach, may provide a solution to the problems encountered: at small scale, using a 2 kW solar furnace, we can easily observe the yield and the structure evolution of the produced materials and have a better knowledge of their formation mechanisms; scaling- up the experiments, with the 1000 kW solar furnace, we can increase the production using the better set of synthesis parameters deduced from previous experiments.