SAM for CSP water treatement solution ?

Hi all,
is it possible to use SAM as a simulation tool for a sytem of water treatment using direct solar heat for distillation ?
thanks

SAM is designed to model electric power generation systems (except for the solar water heating model for residential and commercial solar water heating systems that displace electricity purchases), so it does not have options for water treatment or other thermal applications.
It is possible to use SAM to calculate hourly temperatures at the outlet of a concentrating solar power system's solar field, and use that data as input to a separate model. There are several limitations to that approach that are described in other posts. For example:
sam.nrel.gov/content/using-sam-model-steam-production
Best regards,

Paul.

Thanks a lot for that quick reply !

We do get a lot of requests for CSP models for process heat applications, and hope to be able to develop such models for a future version of SAM. However, we do not have funding for that work at the moment.

Best regards,
Paul.

We have plans to add an option to SAM's linear collector CSP models (parabolic trough and linear Fresnel) to facilitate modeling of systems that provide heat for an application other than power generation. We hope that will be available in the version of SAM that we release in mid to late 2016.
In the meantime, please see the following document for a description of how to adjust the power cycle inputs in the current version of SAM to approximate the performance of a parabolic trough or linear Fresnel solar field for a thermal application:
Turchi, C.; Neises, T. (2015). Parabolic Trough Solar-Thermal Output Model Decoupled from SAM Power Block Assumptions. Milestone report prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy. ( PDF 542 KB )
Best regards,

Paul.