Last Monday, after having participated in a few web meetings, we were finally able to meet in person at SCoSCo’s kickoff meeting in SIJ’s facilities. We were able to organize our work plan effectively, after having discussed a lot of interesting ideas on the implementation of our project.
The present participants introduced themselves with relevant information about their endeavors and expertise. Prof. Alexopoulos introduced SIJ and its specific fields of work to the participants. Mr. Konstantinidis introduced Calpak, which has a long experience in producing low-temperature solar collectors. Calpak’s portfolio includes a range of different collector types (FPC,VTC), thermosiphonic systems, and water tanks. The company has a well-established distribution system and is holding several Solar Keymark certifications. Nowadays the company is building a new production site in Corinth including a warehouse, offices and an exhibition room. One of the SCoSCo prototypes will be used in conjunction with a double effect absorption chiller, to cool the exhibition room. The company Heliokon was introduced by Mr. Yousefpour.
The objectives and the timetable of the project were presented and discussed. By mutual agreement, it was decided to shift the schedule by 3 months, due to delayed start in each country. After getting into detail on the prototypes working principle and construction, Mr Schorn gave us a tour at SIJ’s research facilities and presented to us the test rig that will be used for the outdoor experiments. Returning to the meeting room, a short workshop on CARNOT was organized by Dr Göttsche. CARNOT is a thermal simulations MATLAB toolkit designed for solar thermal systems and will be used on our project. Before the end of the first day, we visited the solar tower at SIJ, guided by Prof. Alexopoulos.
On Thursday, Prof. Alexopoulos, Mr Yousefpour and Mr Panagopoulos attended the Greek-German Programme Meeting in Forschungszentrum, Jülich. Our project’s general idea and work plan was presented to the audience by Prof. Alexopoulos. We are looking forward to our next project meeting in Patras, Greece in April/May 2019.