SOLAR PRODUCTION OF FUELS AND COMMODITIES

SFERA III
Solar Facilities for the European Research Area - Third Phase
Contacts
Funding
Duration
Ricardo Sanchez ricardo.sanchez@psa.es
Alfonso Vidal, alfonso.vidal@ciemat.es
9,103 M€ EC European Union.
January, 2019 – December 2023
Background

SFERA III is a Horizon 2020 project funded under the Research Infrastructure Program. The consortium is coordinated by CIEMAT-PSA and made by a total of 15 partners from 9 EU member countries. The overall objective of this project is to carry on with the work done during the past 8 years in the SFERA 1 and SFERA 2 projects and reinforce the sustainability of the activities of the European advanced Concentrating Solar Power research infrastructures.
Those activities will include (I) networking activities to further develop the cooperation between the research infrastructures, the scientific community, industries and other stakeholders; (II) transnational access activities aiming at providing access to all European researchers from both academia and industry to singular scientific and technological solar research infrastructures; and (III) joint research activities whose sole purpose is to improve the integrated services provided by the infrastructure.

The Unit of Solar fuels is participating in Work Package 8 whose objective is to develop high-performance diagnostic and dynamic control tools for solar thermochemical fuel production system using concentrated solar energy.
These objectives are broken in three main goals:

  • Benchmarking the various technologies available for solar fuel production via CST technologies.
  • Developing techniques for testing of components, subsystems, and materials performance and reliability.
  • Developing dedicated software and algorithms for the dynamic control and optimized operation of each subsystem and of the entire integrated fuel production system.
Participants
CNRS (France),  University of Perpignan (France), ENEA (Italy), DLR (Germany),  CEA (France) , University of Evora (Portugal), ETH (Switzerland), IMDEA  Energia (Spain), The CXyprus Insitute (Chipre) , Franunhofer Institute (Germany), LNEG (Portugal) , Middle East Technical University (Turkey) , Universidad de Almeria, Euronovia (France), European Solar Thermal electricity association (Belgium) and CIEMAT (Spain).