MICROCOGENERAZIONE SOLARE AD ALTA EFFICIENZA E PICCOLA SCALA ENERGETICA

Abstract

Stopping the consumption of natural resources or at least sensibly slowing it down is a compulsory necessity felt at global level and this work, focused on a small solar microcogenerator in the range of 1 kW of electric power and up to 3 kW of thermal power, gives a contribution developing a system useful for the decentralised and diffuse production of electricity and heat with high conversion efficiencies at low power scale.  The presented solar microcogenerator makes use of an industrial Stirling engine of small size, with an electrical efficiency up to 32%, originally designed for domestic combined heat power applications in gas boilers. The heat acceptor of the Stirling head has been completely re-engineered for the solar application, together with an original solar dish concentrator moved by a suitable tracking system. At the considered energy power scale, this is a world first with an experimentation fully carried out at University of Calabria in a public-private collaboration framework.