Synhelion is developing the technology for producing carbon-neutral solar fuels with the aim of substantially contributing, in the near future, to the decarbonization of the transport sector. The key components of this technology are: (i) the innovative absorbing gas solar receiver to collect the incoming concentrated solar radiation to feed the plant, (ii) the sensible heat thermocline thermal energy storage unit to store thermal energy enabling 24/7 plant operativity and (iii) the thermochemical reactor to produce syngas (i.e., H2/CO rich mixture as precursor to liquid hydrocarbon synthetic fuels). Among these, the innovative solar receiver concept, representing a technology breakthrough with respect to conventional commercial solar receivers, has been the subject of several years of research, development and engineering which, based upon the latest outcomes of on-sun experimental tests on a small scale 200 kW prototype (concentrated solar input power), resulted to be capable of efficiently operating at very high temperature levels (1’000 °C-1’500 °C). More recently, the design advancement of the thermal energy storage unit, the thermochemical reactor and other ancillary components (i.e., piping, insulation and backup heater among others) was also pursued with the ambitious aim of arriving on time at the realization of DAWN, the world’s first industrial-scale solar fuel plant that is currently being built in Jülich (Germany) with a foreseen commissioning scheduled for 2024. With this first plant, targeting a production of several thousand liters of synthetic fuel per year, Synhelion aims at demonstrating the entire Sun-to-Liquid process on an industrial scale. Furthermore, a successor plant to DAWN is already being developed with a capacity of about thousand tonnes per year. This plant, called RISE, will be likely located in Spain and is expected to be operative in 2026. However, to effectively follow the development path, additional research and engineering activities are needed to further advance in the design scaleup of the key components of the technology to be integrated in the two plants. Therefore, within this project, specific research and development questions related to all the aforementioned components, inevitably arising when facing the challenges of scaling up an intrinsically complex technology, will be addressed.
