Conference article

Concentrated solar power plants (CSP) coupled with thermal storage have the potential of being competitive with conventional fossil fuel and hydro power plants, in terms of dispatchability and provision of ancillary services. To achieve this potential, the plant design has to be focused on ?exible operation, which is the main goal of the PreFlexMS Horizon 2020 European research project. This can be achieved by the integration of a Molten Salt Once Through Steam Generator within the power unit, an innovative technology with greater ?exibility potential if compared to steam drum boilers, currently the state of the art in CSP. Given the focus on ?exible operation, dynamic modelling and simulation from the early design stages is of paramount importance, to assess the plant dynamic behaviour and controllability, and to predict the achievable closed-loop dynamic performance, potentially saving money and time during the detailed design, construction and commissioning phases. The present paper aims to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve this goal by means of Modelica-based open-source libraries and tools.

simulation, Modelica, solar power plants, once-through boilers, open-source tools