ULTIMATE TROUGH® - Fabrication, erection and commissioning of the world's largest parabolic trough collector

A first Ultimate Trough (R) (UT) collector demonstration loop was successfully integrated in an existing solar power plant California and is now put into operation. Its huge dimensions of one Solar Collector Assembly (SCA) with an aperture of 7.5 m and a length of 247 m makes it the largest parabolic trough collector ever built and operated. It is expected that this reduces the solar field cost by 20 to 25 %. The fabrication and erection of a collector with the present dimensions exceeds present knowledge and experience. To safety for the design of upcoming solar thermal power plants with the same collector, it was decided to demonstrate fabrication and erection procedures as they will be applied in series production. The paper describes the part manufacturing, as well as site assembling procedures, transportation and new developed tools. Furthermore, it gives an overview on the assembly process on site. The UT collector is designed to avoid complex and costly SCE alignment procedures in the field. The principles and results the new SCE alignment method are presented. With this new parabolic trough collector a major step towards solar field cost reduction has been achieved. The process has reached the final step, and the Ultimate Trough has reached market maturity. It is now planned to be applied commercial collector field applications. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).