Loughborough University
Browse
EPPM 149.pdf (234.91 kB)

Cost-effective parabolic trough foundations for concentrated solar power plants

Download (234.91 kB)
conference contribution
posted on 2014-11-20, 13:43 authored by Paul Dallyn, Ashraf El-HamalawiAshraf El-Hamalawi, Alessandro Palmeri
As part of the continuing requirement for a broad sustainable energy mix, substantial investment is being currently made into renewable energy, including concentrated solar power (CSP). To improve the financial viability of this under-developed technology, research into optimising design is underway in order to reduce the large capital costs associated with CSP plants. At present around 30 % of capital costs of a 50 MW farm are in the solar field (Vallentine et al., 2009), due to the large number of solar collector assemblies (SCAs) required, and therefore there is a large potential to reduce the overall cost by optimising the design of the SCAs and their foundations. The challenge arises in reducing material and weight, and in simplifying manufacture and assembly, while maintaining the structural rigidity, as the efficiency of the collectors is highly dependent on the optical accuracy. This can be potentially compromised by the wind loading, which is predicted to be the most significant source of optical error (Kolb and Diver, 2008), particularly for flexible systems. A literature review has highlighted that considerable effort has been put into optimising SCA design, but the foundations have been neglected. As well as this there is limited understanding of the loads experienced by the foundations of SCAs. This paper will present the current level of understanding of SCA loading and how this knowledge can be used to derive the variation in foundation design across the solar field and therefore allow optimisation of foundation design, highlighting potential capital savings that can be made in a typical 50 MW CSP plant.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Research Unit

  • Centre for Innovative and Collaborative Engineering (CICE)

Published in

3rd International Conference on Engineering, Project and Production Management

Pages

? - ? (12)

Citation

DALLYN, P., EL-HAMALAWI, A. and PALMERI, A., 2012. Cost-effective parabolic trough foundations for concentrated solar power plants. IN: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Engineering, Project and Production Management, Brighton, 10-11 September 2012, 12pp.

Publisher

EPPM 2012

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2012

Notes

This is a conference paper.

Language

  • en

Location

Brighton

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC