Aerial Solar Thermal Radiometric Observer ("ASTRO")

Digitization of plant performance and O&M data has become a new best practice in the world of renewable energy asset management. Large owners and operators of photovoltaic and wind power plants are working to digitize performance and O&M data at their existing assets to improve their management of the facilities to increase performance, reduce O&M costs, and lower the overall life cycle cost of ownership. CSP power plants are behind the curve of other technologies on the digitization of plant information to aid in the plant asset management. This project directly addresses the objective of digitizing the O&M data of the solar field. The parabolic trough solar fields in concentrating solar power (CSP) plants cover large areas that can be hundreds or even thousands of acres in size. Solar fields often include thousands of individually tracking parabolic trough collectors that must be maintained. Each collector contains hundreds of components that need to be individually monitored, periodically inspected, and maintained. Currently there are no commercial products available for plants to use to monitor and track the status of their solar fields. Most plants must develop their own systems and typically use a mix of paper lists and spreadsheets to monitor the status of the collectors and the maintenance work conducted in their solar fields. Most CSP plants use computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) or enterprise asset management (EAM) software packages which are adequate to maintain their power plant equipment (turbines, pumps, compressors, etc). But these systems are not well adapted for use with solar fields with 10s or 100s of thousands of components which must be monitored over large areas. Solar Dynamics (SD) is developing custom database-driven software and aerial drone-based inspection capabilities for monitoring and tracking the status of parabolic trough collectors in solar fields. The system can be used to monitor the solar field during construction, through operation, and final decommissioning at the end of the plant’s life. Phase I of this effort focused on developing improved drone-based inspection techniques. SD developed techniques for assessment of receiver tube condition, mirror condition, and optical quality of collectors. Artificial intelligence (AI) was incorporated to extend the baseline aerial surveying technology to automate accurate technical assessment and rapid cataloging of problems without interrupting normal plant operations. Over the process of developing and demonstrating the drone data collection capabilities at modest sized plants (50 MW), massive amounts of data was collected, and it became clear that it was also necessary to develop innovative approaches for managing and viewing the data in useful ways. Such systems are needed such that plant engineers and management can query the data to analyze and identify systematic issues, enabling them to make educated and actionable management decisions. For this reason, in Phase II SD proposes to continue development of the drone-based inspections, but also to integrate the new FieldStatusTM program developed under a DOE Solar Energy Technology Office (SETO) SIPS project titled “OPTOM” (Optimization of Parabolic Trough Operations & Maintenance, DE-EE0006379) for viewing collector status and tracking issues. The SD team is well suited to execute this proposed work. SD personnel have led development, design, and operations of some of the largest CSP power plants in the world. In addition, SD has built and deployed a baseline aerial survey system that is the basis for further research and development under this SBIR project. The SD team has experience developing tools to support the O&M of CSP plants.