The fabrication and erection of a collector with the present dimensions exceeds present knowledge and experience. To provide safety for the design of upcoming solar thermal power plants with the same collector, it was decided to demonstrate all 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 erection 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 of 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 development process has reached the final step, and the Ultimate Trough has reached market maturity. It is now planned to be applied for commercial collector field applications.