The background For decades, gases have been largely overlooked as heat-transfer fluids in concentrated solar receiver systems, mainly due to their poor heat transfer capability and the high pumping power required. Early research on gaseous heat transfer fluids in...
Volateq has successfully deployed faster drone scans to inspect ball joints in a 100 MW solar plant. The firm is addressing the challenge of staying on top of O&M with a drone-based inspection system capable of scanning an entire solar field in one hour, with...
In a video call from the US, SolarPACES caught up with Ranga Pitchumani, Editor-in-Chief of Solar Energy, a leading journal in the field. Dr. Pitchumani was the Chief Scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), SunShot Initiative, Founding Director of its...
A new paper from researchers at PROMES-CNRS in France presents a control strategy to reliably deliver a precise thermal power from concentrated solar to meet industrial heat requirements. The objective was to design a proof-of-concept algorithm for operating a...
Solar researchers at Fraunhofer Chile have designed, built, and tested a complete solar collector and crucible system for melting and recycling aluminum, heated by Annular Fresnel solar collectors. In Annular Fresnel, each mirror is flat, like a Fresnel mirror, but...
Solar calcination + sCO2 cycle In a year-round California-based study, a Chilean research team has continued to advance a potentially more cost-effective and efficient form of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) that leverages limestone's heat generation during...
Collaborating with Synhelion engineers, a solar research team at the Solar-Institute Jülich (SIJ) of FH Aachen presented two papers at SolarPACES 2025 assessing the accuracy and reliability of dynamic process models for a solar fuel production system. They used...
A NASA-funded research team at Georgia Tech has developed a method for extracting water from the Moon to generate the hydrogen and oxygen needed for propulsion fuels for solar system exploration. They describe their experimental work in Thermal extraction of H2O(s)...
Following their review, published at Astra Astronautica, covering all previous research using concentrated solar energy to generate heat for melting lunar regolith, co-authors Stéphane Abanades, Sylvain Rodat and PhD student, Jack Robinot, propose that the most...
IMAGE from: Terrestrial Demonstrator for the Hydrogen Extraction of Oxygen from Lunar Regolith with Concentrated Solar Energy °C Thorsten Denk Working at the Plataforma Solar de Almería (PSA), aerospace engineer Thorsten Denk has further refined his solar reactor for...
GlassPoint has secured a partnership to generate its solar steam for Searles Valley Minerals (SVM), a hundred- and fifty-year-old California mining and production firm, one of the largest local employers with over 600 employees. The mining firm operates the mine and...
SolarPACES interviews Ryan Garvey, Founder and Principal Research Scientist at Outward Technologies, which has NASA funding to develop its concentrated solar system for resource extraction, surface construction, and habitat development on the Moon and other planetary...
Researchers have developed a completely different way for Trough CSP to collect solar energy. Normally, in this form of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), long lines of huge ‘trough’-shaped parabolic mirrors move slowly all day as the sun crosses the sky, to keep...
In a comprehensive new study published in Applied Energy, researchers find that a new streamlined version of a star-shaped solar receiver can collect more thermal energy and last significantly longer than today’s cylindrical solar receivers used to collect heat in...
Researchers collaborating between ICV-CSIC in Spain and at the Odeillo solar furnace in France have devised a novel way to maximize thermal energy storage in Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants. They wanted to encapsulate the maximum amount of the molten salts used...
"Expanding the amount of energy that can be stored in sand is as simple as adding more sand" Craig Turchi, manager of the Thermal Energy Science and Technologies Research Group at NREL has said. In 2018, a team of researchers at the US National Renewable Energy...
In 2018, three years after the completion of the second of two utility-scale tower-type Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants in the US, the Department of Energy (DOE) held a competition to decide the funding direction for the next generation of Tower CSP. To transfer...
Nearly all the Tower-type Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants in operation use molten salts to transfer heat to produce electricity. This thermal form of solar energy has value because it incorporates stored thermal energy, which enables grid benefits like rolling...
In concentrated solar power (CSP), how well the working fluid transfers heat through a receiver can make or break system efficiency. For solar-heated thermochemistry, solar receivers need to operate at very high temperatures, up to 1400°C. Gases like air are cheap,...
A groundbreaking new AI simulation tool that dramatically improves power plant operations for parabolic Trough-type Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants has been created by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Michael Wagner, who helped develop the widely...
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