As the 1st SFERA-III campaign for Transnational Access has been achieved, let’s have a look at the most promising projects carried out! This time, we focus on EISSC, a project led by the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) which benefited from free access to the Fraunhofer ISE facilities in September 2019.
About the EISSC project
The EISSC project, which stands for Experimental Investigation of Soiling of Solar Collectors through indoor and outdoor tests, is carried out by the Energy Department of the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy. Thanks the 1st Transnational Access Campaign of SFERA-III, the project could use the infrastructures of our partner, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Germany).
The EISSC project aims at evaluating the effect of soiling on the efficiency losses of heliostats in solar power towers. To do so, indoor and outdoor analysis of soiling and the subsequent comparison and modelling of the results have been conducted.
The main results of the project
A method for artificial indoor soiling was applied to mirror samples with different dust types. The soiling on those mirrors was analysed using different devices which evaluated the effect of the incidence angle, the dust characteristics and the wavelength on the reflectance.
The obtained results allowed the guest researchers to validate and further enhance a previously developed model.
Successful outcomes
This project is a success story for the fruitful cooperation between researchers from different institutions, combining their expertise thanks to transnational access. The ambition and skill of the visiting researchers from the Politecnico di Milano combined with the expertise and infrastructure variety of the measurement devices at Fraunhofer ISE led to highly valuable results in a very short period of time. Moreover, a publication is currently under preparation.
About SFERA-III Transnational Access
The 3rd TA campaign of SFERA-III will be launched at the end of Summer 2020. This next call for projects will provide free access to 13 state-of-art research infrastructures and 47 installations in Concentrated Solar Thermal power in 8 countries. In the meantime, you can watch the last webinar about TA for key information about the call for projects!
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 823802