Control Solar Project

The CONTROL_SOLAR project is an example of the development of new technologies in collaboration with a company and is part of the modality of knowledge transfer projects of the PLAN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION OF NAVARRA 2020, 50% financed by the Government of Navarra and 50% of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Photovoltaic solar energy is one of the fastest growing renewable energies. To maintain and accelerate this growth, contributing to climate change objectives, it is necessary to slewing drive improve the underlying technologies by increasing the efficiency of solar farms and reducing operating costs.

STI Norland is one of the leading global companies, specialized in the design, manufacture slewing drive and supply of structures and solar trackers. Founded in 1996 in Pamplona, it has participated in the development of the most important solar plants in the world.

Since the 90s, the MCC area (Measure Control and Communications) of AIN has generated knowledge, to use and transfer in this project in the following matters:

• Automatic control of multivariable systems.
• Development of hardware and software monitoring and control robust, stable and fault tolerant through the use of operating systems in real time (RTOS).
• Low-cost wireless sensor networks (WSN)

Due to the growth of the size of the new installations, as well as the use of multifila followers, STI has detected new development needs in the control electronics of solar trackers and their wireless communications systems.

The main objective of the project is the development of a new electronic control system for solar tracker. This system must minimize its electricity consumption, as well as the times and costs of production stops, maintenance and manual operation of the facilities. In this way, production times, energy efficiency and profitability of slewing drive photovoltaic plants will be maximized.

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Duration of the project: March 2018 - December 2019

This company has received a grant co-financed at 50% by the European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Program FEDER 2014-2020 of Navarra.