News

HelioCon announces publication of 2024 Annual Report

The Heliostat Consortium’s 2024 annual report details new advances in an array of technologies to improve the cost and performance of heliostats. "HelioCon has made tremendous progress on developing, maturing, and validating third-party evaluation and testing capabilities to make them ready for industry," said Guangdong Zhu, HelioCon executive director. "This is exactly what the industry needs right now." 

The report also highlights the growth of the HelioCon community over the past year and the consortium’s plans for 2025. Read the 2024 HelioCon annual report and learn more about how HelioCon is driving solar innovation and building the CSP community. 

Read the news release. 

News

OpenCSP is now live

OpenCSP is a new collaborative environment supporting software, computer-aided design (CAD), data, education, and other applications for concentrating solar power (CSP). “The goal of OpenCSP is to reduce barriers to access high quality metrology and analysis tools, to increase performance of concentrating solar power systems,” says HelioCon member Randy Brost of Sandia National Laboratories. To learn more about this open-source platform, go to the OpenCSP website. Find an overview of the platform’s current offerings at the Portfolio tab. 

News

HelioCon partner welcomes visiting NREL researcher in Spain

International collaboration is at the center of the HelioCon community. When NREL researcher Rebecca Mitchell visited Plataforma Solar de Almería in southern Spain at the beginning of October, CIEMAT senior researcher and HelioCon board member Antonio Avila-Marin and a team of CSP researchers showed up to support her work. “Collaborative work makes us stronger in the objective of making CSP succeed,” Avila-Marin shared on LinkedIn. Learn more about Mitchell’s research on heliostat optical measurement and other topics from our HelioCon Seminar Series library. 

News

HelioCon went to the 2024 SolarPACES Annual Conference!

Many of our researchers presented at the premiere global CSP conference this year, and they covered a broad range of topics, including wind loading on heliostats, the commercial readiness of several new metrology and testing tools, and how HelioCon’s work is advancing the next generation of CSP technologies on many fronts. In case you could not join us in Rome—learn more about our researchers’ latest work here.
SolarPACES presentations coming soon!

The first image shows the 9 different combinations of surface and adhesive materials subjected to peel testing.

The second image shows a sample laminate stack with a 1 mm mirror supported by honeycomb before applying and edge seal structure.

Featured Project

Heliocon Components and Controls: Composites

Description:
The components and controls FY24 subtask is focused on laminating and testing coupon sandwich mirror facets with 96% reflectivity mirrors. Improving reflectivity from 93% to 96% results in significant field performance gains that offer more than a one-to-one reduction in CSP LCOE. 96% reflectivity is achieved with 1-2 mm glass mirrors as opposed to the standard 3-4 mm glass. Such thin glass is not structurally robust and therefore requires additional support. Testing with coupons provide the opportunity to learn which adhesive materials and support structures provide the most protection to the silver layer as well as robustness to hail and other damage mechanisms.

Project Lead:
Matthew Muller, NREL

Status: 

• Samples are currently undergoing damp heat, UV plus humidity and thermal cycling with humidity.

Featured Researcher

Nathan Stegall (Solar Dynamics)

Nathan Stegall leads the mechanical design of heliostats and parabolic trough collectors for Solar Dynamics LLC. He has 9 years of experience in CSP collector development and R&D at Solar Dynamics and previously at Abengoa Solar, and 20 total years of engineering, product design, commercialization, and management experience in multiple industries. His current efforts focus on material optimization, optical improvements, design for manufacturing, and assembly automation of Solar Dynamics’ advanced SunLite and SunRing heliostats, and commercial demonstration of the SunBeam large-aperture parabolic trough collector.

Past Featured Researchers