CSP Videos

CSP Overview

Mechanical engineering course lecture providing an overview of CSP Overview of CSP technologies.

CSP Troughs and Power Towers

Updates to the Physical Trough Model in SAM 2018.11.11, Nov 2018

This presentation describes the updates to SAM's Physical Trough model for Version 2018.11.11.

Supporting Materials

Modeling Molten Salt Power Tower Systems in SAM 2017.1.17

Mike Wagner describes the molten salt power tower model in SAM 2017.1.17, with a discussion of choosing a reference DNI value for a given location, optimizing the solar field using SolarPILOT in SAM, and using the automatic dispatch optimization option.

Supporting materials:

Modeling Power Towers in SAM, Feb 2015

This webinar provides an overview of SAM's power tower models. Mike Wagner of NREL presented this overview on February 19, 2015 with demonstrations in SAM 2015.1.30 showing how to use SolarPILOT to automatically layout and optimize the solar field.

Modeling Parabolic Trough Systems, Jun 2014

The Modeling Parabolic Trough Systems webinar was presented on June 18, 2014 by Michael Wagner of NREL. It describes how to model a parabolic trough system with molten salt heat transfer fluid using SAM's physical trough model.

This video is based on an old version of SAM with a different user interface than the current version, but much of the information in the video is still valid for the current version.

Presentation slides (PDF 4.29 MB)

The following SAM file (.zsam) was used for the demonstration (use SAM 2014.1.14 to open the file):

  • Parabolic Trough System with Molten Salt HTF (ZSAM 104 KB)

The following SAM file (.sam) is a similar example, but for use with SAM 2015.1.30 or later:

  • Parabolic Trough System with Molten Salt HTF (SAM 97 KB)

Industrial Process Heat

Overview of New Industrial Process Heat and CSP Capabilities in SAM 2017.1.17

Paul Gilman and Ty Neises describe the new parabolic trough and linear direct steam models for solar industrial process heat (SIPH, or IPH) applications, and also briefly describe an update to the CSP generic model.

Supporting materials:

CSP Field Optimization

NREL's SolarPilot and SolTrace Open-source Software, July 2018

NREL's Michael Wagner presented on NREL's SolarPilot™ and SolTrace Open-source Software in July 18, 2018.

Supporting files: