SMARTCSP: enfoque Industria 4.0 para una reducción efectiva de costos de las plantas termoeléctricas (CSP)

Abstract

Today, Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants and components

incorporate a low degree of intelligence and autonomy that

makes it expensive and makes quality control difficult. The

degree of automation of CSP plants is low; the development of

protocols, procedures and standards to ensure quality control

during assembly, construction, commissioning and operation

of the plant are still in their early stages. Meanwhile, Industry

4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm are the

key technological breakthroughs for the manufacturing

industry since the last century; and such can be SMARTCSP

for the CSP since its commercial inception 50 years ago.

SMARTCSP benefits from this experience in the application

of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) or Lean

Manufacturing in mature industrial fields such as automotive

or manufacturing to create a new generation of SMARTCSP

Components that include a full set of relevant functionalities

right from the production line. SMARTCSP will provide higher

levels of distributed intelligence, autonomy and decision

making in CSP plants through distributed and miniaturized

processors, sensors, and communications embedded in CSP

components. Moreover, a new CSP plant concept is proposed

that allows for an optimized operation and maintenance of the

plant. All this entails the first step towards the crystallization

of the Industry 4.0 paradigm in the field of CSP technologies.