Recommendations for the Reduction of Failures During the Planning and Installation Phases of Solar Thermal Process Heat Systems
Abstract
Although several studies investigated failures in large solar thermal systems (STS) in the past, some of these failures still occur in recently built systems for solar process heat applications. Besides technical issues according to the long term reliability of components, which have to be addressed by the manufacturers, many problems lead back to insufficient planning or failures during installation. Such failures in STS can reduce the performance perceptibly and will continually impair the image and acceptance for solar thermal process heat systems. To support the market development of large individualized STS the “human caused failures” should be reduced significantly. Therefore, wide spread problems, especially those with a high impact on the performance, will be collected, analyzed and disseminated to the target groups to provide applicable failure prevention recommendations.
Keywords
Failure prevention, Large solar thermal systems, Individualized systems, Solar process heat