Solar power plants are a good way to create cheap access and are environmentally friendly for developing countries with a high rate of sunshine.
The MiCST project (Micro-concentrated solar power plant), led by Schneider Electric, is a collaborative project to create a low power concentrated solar power plant (about 10 kW). Schneider aims at building it in isolated areas with a high rate of sunshine and where there are no connections to any electrical network.
The system consists of three major elements:
- a set of thermal solar collectors
- a storage tank containing a warm fluid to feed motor during periods without sun
- a thermodynamic machine
The heat transfer fluid chosen for this project is water, an ecological solution unlike existing solutions which use other kinds of products.
We intervened in the synthesis of a global power plant model from knowledge-based models of our partners. Starting from there, we conceived a Matlab graphical tool to size the system of which the purpose is to minimise the cost of electrical producible compared to power plant lifetime. Acsystème is also involved in designing energetic management strategies, control laws of flows to maximise the installation efficiency and control laws to deal with the electrical power variations.