TECNALIA-RBTK
ROBOTIKER, founded in 1985, is a private Technology Centre member of TECNALIA Technology Corporation, the 5th European private Technology Corporation in Europe. The most promising market in ROBOTIKER is the Energy unit, which is highly specialised in Electro-technologies, being the most important ones the Industrial Electronics, Communication Systems for the Electricity Sector, Electric Generators, New Energy Generation and Storage Technologies and Electrical Networks. These technologies are mainly focused on Renewable Energy Sources (Wind, Photovoltaics and Wave) and their integration into the electric system, covering different lines of expertise: Power electronics for grid connection or Power quality assessment.
The main activity in the field of Photovoltaics concerns the Balance of System (BOS) components, i.e the set of equipments except for PV modules that allows PV modules to be connected to the grid. Some of our most important references on our electronic background are: (i) Research and development of an innovative 2 kW DC-DC converter for great PV installations, following with the new modular topology for PV systems (ii) development of 200 W DC-DC converter applied to the PV module, with MPPT algorithm included. The final objective is the improvement of the energy production by means of the reduction of mismatching losses in PV systems. This electronic device performs the MPPT algorithm, and sends data by Power line communication, without additional wiring.
ROBOTIKER has also developed a prototype of a 1.5 kW grid-connected PV inverter, both control and power electronics, and is currently commercialised in Europe. In this sense, a commercial product to monitor PV plants has been designed and patented by ROBOTIKER. It consists of a visualisation panel and software for PC that allow both local and remote monitoring of PV magnitudes. SOLARVIEW ® – Monitoring system for PV plants.
The main contribution of ROBOTIKER-Tecnalia to APOLLON project will be focused on electronic development for the tracking systems, both for Point Focus and Mirror based Spectra Splitting systems, and for an intelligent module integrated MPPT device. Moreover, the thermal analysis on 2nd generation Mirror based Spectra Splitting systems, as well as economic assessment for the intelligent module integration will be also carried out. Regarding the Thermal Analysis, we have used UG and NX Nastran Thermal Analysis or CFD tools like FLUENT.