’’Commercial” installations in Spain and Tunisia

In late 2007 a Fresnel process heat collector with 352 m2 aperture area (176 kWpth) was installed on the roof of the Escuela Superior de Ingenieros (ESI), a university building of the Faculty of Engineering in Seville, Spain. The collector has a total length of 64 m (16 modules, 4 m length each) and otherwise a similar design as the ones in Freiburg and Bergamo. The collector powers a double effect H2O/LiBr absorption chiller (Broad), with maximum cooling capacity of 174 kWth, for air-conditioning of the building. At this site the wet-cooling tower for heat rejection, which is usually necessary for H2O/LiBr absorption chillers, will be substituted by a water heat exchanger

fed by water out of the nearby river Guadalquivir. The double effect absorption chiller offers a high COP of up to 1.3, which makes this system a further attractive application of solar process heat for solar thermal cooling. First operation experience of the system is positive and measurement results are expected soon.

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Figure 5. The PSE Fresnel collector in Seville, Spain, with an aperture area of 352 m2 (176 kWpth).

The latest installation of our collector is at a winery in Tunisia, where the collector powers a 5TR NH3/H2O chiller from Robur. The installation was realized in the frame of a European funded project (MEDISCO), which will cover monitoring and performance evaluation of the system.

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Figure 6. The PSE Fresnel collector in Tunisia (MEDISCO project)

Both, the installation in Spain as well as the one in Tunisia are research / demonstration projects for solar cooling. However, from the viewpoint of the collector manufacturer both are commercial projects, which indicate the start of commercialization of the PSE linear Fresnel process heat collector.