Physical parabolic trough

Hello,

There seems to be a glitch in the parabolic trough model, when you change the SM from the default value of 2 to 3, the program crashes. This seems to be the case for large SMs. I checked the previous version of SAM (2017), but It worked just fine. Any thoughts on that?

MAny thanks

Hi Mehdi,

This is a bug that will be fixed in the next version of SAM. The problem is caused by the pipe sizing algorithm. (We fixed the problem for this SSC GitHub Issue .)

For now, you can use the following workaround to avoid the crash. It involves increasing the value of the "Design-point velocity to size the TES pipe diameters" that is not displayed on SAM's input pages. The workaround results in smaller thermal energy storage (TES) pipe diameters, which in turn increases the TES parasitic pumping power, but should have a minimal effect on the overall results.

1. Start SAM and open or create your parabolic trough case.

2. On the File menu, click Inputs browser.

3. In the input browser's Search box, type the name of the input variable "V_tes_des" or use the scroll bar to find the variable in the table.

4. Increase the variable's value, perhaps by 0.5.

5. Close the input browser and save the file.

6. Run a simulation.

7. If SAM crashes, repeat Steps 2-6 until it does not crash.

For example, for the default case, changing the value of V_tes_des from 1.85 to 2.5 avoids the crash.

Best regards,
Paul.