Research Projects

Project aims at establishing a national research facility on solar thermal power (1 MWe grid interactive), a test facility for component and system characterization, and development of simulation facility for future scale-up of plant capacity.

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Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay has built the plant from the design conceptualization to the rolling of steam turbine and a detailed description of activities in the project is as follows: 1. National Solar Thermal Power Plant: All the components of the power plant have been installed and tested for its functionality. The steam turbine has been tested using steam generated from parabolic trough and linear Fresnel reflector solar fields. Power is evacuated to the local grid. Performance test of solar fields, steam turbine would be carried out and experience from operation of the solar thermal plant will be shared. A 3-day CEP course was conducted on solar thermal power generation in IIT Bombay in April, 2013. In order to present the current status of the test and simulator facility to potential users and to get their feedback, a workshop was done at IIT, Bombay on 21st February, 2014. 2. Simulation Facility: The preliminary version of the simulator was released in July 2011 which was downloaded in 150 institutes, 230 industry and other organizations across 24 countries. The Evaluation Version v 1.0 of the solar thermal simulator was released in November, 2012. IITB has given evaluation license for evaluation and testing of the version to Fichtner India Pvt. Ltd. The current version v 2.0 of the software allows quasi-steady state simulation of a complete plant or a user defined small subset of complete plant and the data input and output is through graphical user interface (GUI). The simulator produces results, such as, output of all equipments for each time step, annual power generation, capital cost and cost of energy. Parametric study can be done by changing the system parameters, such as, control variable, location, stream parameters and equipment model parameters. The whole process is saved in ASCII format in such a way that if the user edits anything in the text file then that changes will be reflected after importing the file to the simulator. During the future course, it is intended to enhance the existing equipment model library and working fluid model library and validation and refinement of the equipment models will also be performed based on the actual performance of these equipments on the field.

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