Under the economic and political pressure due to the depletion of fossil fuels and global
warming concerns, it is necessary to develop more sustainable techniques to provide
electrical power. In this context, the present study aims at designing, building and testing a
small-scale organic Rankine cycle (ORC) solar power plant (∼ 3 kWe) in order to define and
optimize control strategies that could be applied to larger systems. This paper presents a first
step of the design of the solar power plant and focuses more specifically on the ORC engine …

Under the economical and political pressure due to the depletion of fossil fuel and global
warming potential, it is necessary to develop more sustainable techniques to provide
electrical power. In this context, medium and large scale Organic Rankine Cycle solar power
plants appear to be a promising solution because of their good efficiency, robustness and
acceptable economical probability. However, only a few ORC solar power plants are in
operation today, but technical literature indicate that several demonstration projects are …