Development of a Molten Salt Parabolic Trough Test Platform Simulator for Training Purposes of the Operating Staff

Kurzfassung

Power plant operators are responsible for plant integrity, staff safety and optimal performance of highly sophisticated facilities. Most commonly, large-scale power plants are highly automated. Test facilities, however, aim to provide evidence for the usability of new technologies or components. Consequently, test plants are mostly much smaller in capacity and to a lesser extend automated. The more important are skilled operators, who can safely run the test facility. The same applies to test facilities of parabolic trough power plants with molten salt as heat transfer fluid. The technologies and components used are novel, components or control systems can change regularly and there is no experience and no standards available for operation of parabolic trough solar fields with molten salt as working fluid. Under ambient conditions the salt would freeze, excessive temperature gradients could damage plant components and molten salt would decompose if overheated. Consequently, there exists the need to provide foregoing training to the staff with little risk of damage to the components and without endangering staff or the environment. Therefore, DLR developed a simulator for the test facility in the “HPS2 – High Performance Solar 2” project, which enables the virtual control of the salt cycle and allows to become acquainted with the behaviour of the test facility before commissioning. The human machine interface is based on pre-designs of the planned control system which will be done by Siemens (SPPA-T3000) and the simulator is basically programmed in LabVIEW. Simulation of the solar field is done by a tool for detailed transient simulations of solar fields, called Virtual Solar Field, which was developed by the DLR. This tool is integrated to the simulator via TCP/IP connection. The plant model in LabVIEW features detailed physical models of the hydraulic network and the storage system, as well as control logics for protective functions and automatic operation modes as defined in the functional description of the test plant. Simulations validated the correct behaviour of the physical models. Measured weather data are provided as a predefined set of data with varying weather conditions (sunny or cloudy) at different seasons. The plant model can be controlled completely manually to gain experience about the behaviour of such a parabolic trough cycles.