Parabolic Trough Collectors (PTC) plants, which represent the 98% of the concentrated solar facilities installed today, is viewed as one of the main alternative to the problems regarding global warming and fossil fuels exhaustion.
However, cost competitiveness remains a crucial barrier to their deployment, being the maintenance and control of heat thermal fluid (HTF) temperature one of the main causes. Current control systems of HTF present lots of limitations, controlling few specific HTF pipe points and offering high uncertainty about the real state of the plant and the expensive HTF. This fact causes degradation of HTF and economical losses associated to long non-operational time of the plant.
The general objective of DIMONTEMP project is the commercialization of an innovative system for DISTRIBUTED MONITORING of HTF temperature through the entire solar field at PTC power plants, using optical fiber (FO) as sensorization element, allowing a reduction of HTF related O&M cost and an important increase of facilities availability.