by AF 0713 a3 — July 17, 2009—Stirling Energy Systems (SES) and its sister company Tessera Solar recently unveiled four newly designed solar power collection dishes at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF). Called SunCatchers, the new dishes have a refined design that will be used in commercial-scale deployments beginning in 2010.
The four new dishes are the next generation of the original SunCatcher system. Six first-generation SunCatchers built over the past several years at the NSTTF have been producing up to 150 kilowatts of grid-ready electrical power during the day, according to SES.
Sandia’s concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) team has been working closely with SES over the past five years to improve the system design and operation.
The new SunCatcher is about 5,000 pounds lighter than the original, is round instead of rectangular to allow for more efficient use of steel, has improved optics, and consists of 60 percent fewer engine parts. The revised design also has 40 mirrors instead of 80.
Among Sandia’s contributions to the new design was development of a tool to determine how well the mirrors work in less than 10 seconds, something that took the earlier design one hour.
In addition to improved manufacturability and easy maintenance, the new SunCatcher minimizes both cost and land use and has numerous environmental advantages, said SES.
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