Within the project MeQuSo SOLID and AEE – Institute for Sustainable Technologies (AEE INTEC) together with other selected industrial partners have intensively dealt with the question of how to make well-founded statements about the performance of large solar thermal plants (100 – 100,000 kW thermal power) in active operation. The evaluation of solar thermal plants is not an easy task: irradiation intensities behave differently than predicted and are also not identical at the same time on such large areas, actual heat removal and temperature levels sometimes differ significantly from the parameters expected in planning and forecasting. In practice, this often leads to uncertainties among the stakeholders in planning and operation (plant operators, planners, collector manufacturers, investors).
“Large and wide steps”
Maria Moser of SOLID, appeals to the fact that large and wide steps are necessary to advance the energy transition.
With the help of the D-CAT method, developed in MeQuSo, meaningful parameters are determined with the aid of measurement data from real plant operation, which automatically show how powerful the collector field actually is in practice. These parameters are comparable to the results of a standard test for individual solar collectors, but extended to the physical effects occurring in large collector arrays. The performance parameters describe the optical properties, heat losses and heat transfers in the collector field in real time. Causes of any reduced yield can thus be quickly and specifically identified, assigned and remedied. D-CAT can thus be used universally for targeted cause research as well as for optimization tasks, thus making an essential contribution to quality assurance and yield reliability in large-scale solar thermal systems.
This project has won this year’s Innovation Award of ACR – Austrian Cooperative Research. ACR is the umbrella organization of cooperative non-university research institutes in Austria, which primarily support small and medium-sized enterprises in the field of application-oriented research, development and innovation.
On the evening of October 19, SOLID, represented by CEO Stephan Jantscher and Maria Moser, on behalf of project manager Werner Doll, and AEE INTEC jointly accepted the award in Vienna in front of around 100 guests from business, research and politics.
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