By Kari Williamson
The companies are developing the CSP collector Ultimate Trough®, which could offer a 25% cost reduction of parabolic trough CSP collectors by lowering specific cost (€/m2) and improving performance.
The Ultimate Trough will be optimised for large solar fields in the range of 500,000-2,500,000 m² aperture area.
A larger diameter of the heat collection elements, supported by improved selective coatings with lower emissivity, allows a solar field design with lower specific parasitic consumption and less piping in the solar field, FLABEG says.
The number of drives, sensors and controls is reduced by more than 50%. In addition the number of units to be assembled, checked, mounted, aligned and commissioned will be reduced by larger CSP collector elements. The solar mirrors will have a dimension of 4 m2.
A prototype consisting of two CSP collector elements is currently being tested in preparation for a demonstration loop in the US where two Solar Collector Assembly (SCAs) will be running in the SEGS VIII plant during spring of the next year to validate the significant performance improvements.
The CSP collector design has been further supported by DLR (German Aerospace Center) and the FhG IML (Fraunhofer Society, Institute for material flow and logistics).