Solar tower power plants play a key role to facilitate the ongoing energy transition as they deliver climate neutral electricity and direct heat for chemical processes. These plants generate temperatures over 1000 °C by reflecting sunlight with thousands of mirrors (heliostats) to a receiver. The temper- ature achievable in practice is limited due to the system’s susceptibility to small surface defects and misalignments of individual mirrors, hindering the plant’s full efficiency. We present an inverse render- ing technique that predicts the incident power distribution of each heliostat, including the inaccuracies, based solely on focal spot images that are already acquired in most solar power plants. The method allows reconstructing flawed mirror shapes within sub-mm precision. Applied at the solar tower plant in Juelich, our approach outperforms all alternatives in accuracy and reliability. Our data-driven method is a key ingredient to building digital twins of solar power plants. It can be integrated into the existing infrastructure and plant control at low cost, leading to increased efficiency of existing and decreased expenses for future power plants, the key factors of success in the competitive market. For other fields, our approach can be a blueprint, as we present the option for the very first large-scale indus- trial deployment of differentiable ray tracing. Merging data-intensive Machine Learning with physical modeling creates flexible, data-efficient and trustworthy solutions applicable in science and industry.

The bending strength of flat glass panels including the effects of their edges, is commonly determined by means of the four-point bending test method. This is an established and reliable method. However, when testing glass thinner than 3 mm, large deformation may occur. This means that the calculated stresses might not correspond to the actual, as the hypothesis behind the small deformation theory does no longer hold. Furthermore, it might occur that the specimen slips out of the supports, compelling the testing impossible. An alternative method, suitable for thin glass, consists of inducing an increasing curvature from flat until fracture. The curvature is to be constant along the length of the specimen at any time. The stress at fracture is calculated by knowing the corresponding radius or the applied bending moment. The equipment capable of performing this test is the clamp bender whereby the glass is held by two clamps at the specimen's ends. Rotational and translational movement combine to uniaxially bend the glass as desired. This paper explores the validity of the clamp bender for testing thin glass M. Zaccaria (B) • N.

<p>The TU Dresden is decisively involved in the development of a sustainable and transparent glazed roof structure. The designed transparent space grid structure is based on a conventional steel space grid, in which all steel members of the compression layer are replaced by glass panes. The glazing transfers large in-plane forces and serves as roof covering. Prerequisite for these structures is the load application of significant compression forces into brittle glass edges. Until now, no comprehensive scientific research has been carried out to investigate suitable contact materials for axial load application at glass edges. The intended detail design requires a contact material, which is softer than glass while providing a high compressive strength, low creeping and a working temperature range between -20°C and +80°C. A large number of metal alloys and polymers were tested with regard to their compressive strength. Tests on their creeping behavior started in 2008.</p><p>The results of current investigation were applied to optimize a full-size roof mock-up, spanning over a distance of 15m.</p>

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