In-situ Testing of Large Collector Arrays – Challenges and Methodological Framework

One year of high-precision operational data including measurement uncertainties from a large-scale solar thermal collector array with flat plate collectors, located in Graz, Austria

“…The MeQuSo project developed a proof of concept of a new in situ collector array test method called D-CAT (Dynamic Collector Array Test) applicable to a variety of typical large-scale solar thermal flat plate collector arrays. The data was additionally used by AEE INTEC within the project CollFieldEff + for the development of collector array models [3] and the project 'Accompanying Research Project Large-scale Solar Thermal Plants' for plant benchmarking and optimization [4] . A major driving force for publishing this dataset was the reliance of open-source software projects on publicly available datasets; the authors of this article are contributing to the development of the open-source software SunPeek for performance monitoring of large-scale solar thermal plants [5] .…”

Review of In Situ Test Methods for Solar Collectors and Solar Collector Arrays

“…Performance reductions that concern the collectors on a component level (such as soiling, broken insulation, faulty foil tension etc.) are reflected in the estimated parameters to obtain a characterization of the collectors under 'real-world' conditions [12]. Heavily soiled collectors will have worse values for the optical parameters than clean collectors.…”

LSEVIER paper: Large Scale Solar Thermal Systems in Leading Countries

“…), in-situ testing of collectors to build systematic knowledge on the "real-world" performance is important. This is currently investigated in the research projects MeQuSo [44] and ZeKon in-situ [45].…”

“…The main advantage of this method lies in its simplicity and easy applicability. The method is not suitable to check the solar yield for which new test methods are under development [44].…”