Development of a smart control unit for small-scale concentrated solar combined heat and power systems for residential applications

Abstract

Solar energy has a significant potential for future power generation but its intermittent and variable nature results in fluctuations of the operational performance of solar power plants. Despite thermal energy storage (TES) systems improving the flexibility and the sustainability of the performance of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants, smart management is required to deal with the complex dynamic variations in the behaviour and interaction of the different plant's subsystems. In this paper, the design, manufacture, and validation of a smart control unit with extended capabilities for a small-scale CSP combined heat and power (CHP) system are described. More precisely, the control unit has been designed to control and optimise the operation of a micro-scale Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) unit coupled with Linear Fresnel Reflectors solar field and an advanced latent heat thermal energy storage tank which were developed by a consortium of universities and companies in the framework of the EU-funded project “Innova Microsolar”.In parallel to the designing and building the smart control unit, an advanced simulator has been developed in Matlab/Simulink® to investigate the performance of the plant for a wide range of varying ambient and operating conditions. The simulation framework has been connected to the real control unit according to a hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) approach to optimise the control logic of the integrated plant to overcome potential technical and reliability issues during the commissioning of the plant. The developed hardware and the proposed scientific approach can be extended to a wide range of complex solar energy systems equipped with TES and to be integrated into the built environment.

Keywords

• Energy systems control
• Energy control logics
• HiL simulator
• Solar ORC control
• Concentrated solar power