SUCCEED - Sustainable and cost-efficient manufacturing of new solar technology in Norway

The aim of SUCCEED is to make high-volume production of Inaventa Solar's cutting-edge solar energy technology more cost-efficient and environmentally sustainable. This will be reached by developing a real-time Digital Twin / Digital Shadow of the production line that we integrate into the control system to obtain the required production precision and secure product quality. The introduction of high-performance polymers (HPP) for our technology aims to realize the great cost-reduction potential, overcoming existing barriers and opening for new applications and markets for solar heat production. SUCCEED presents a pioneering effort to realize the processing of HPPs to structured sheets by extrusion and lift it to an industrial process. Presently leading structured sheet providers lack suitable production lines to process our technology cost-efficiently and in the required quality. Extrusion of HPPs requires sophisticated control of the process conditions. The focus of our work is to understand, model and verify the critical parameters, and develop control and forecasting based on a digital twin of the production process. SUCCEED aims to solve this challenge in a joint effort with key expertise from research and industry: IFE-Institute of Energy Technology, Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, Inaventa Solar, the production line manufacturer and the material supplier of high-performance polymers. The outcome of this project will represent a game-changer for solar heat production and thus pushing the Green Transition with Norwegian solar technology. In autumn 2021, Inaventa Solar and Omipa have completed all major installations of the pilot extrusion line for high performance polymers at the new production site at Jevnaker. Successful first production trials were conducted with support from the raw material supplier. This milestone was covered by online media and technical news. In the start-up phase of SUCCEED, the critical production steps and processing parameters for the extrusion of HPP were identified, and new sensors and camera systems were installed. To get access, handle and use the current process data digitally, we coordinated a progress plan with input from our IT team, process operators, production line manufacturer and the research teams at IFE. We focused on tracking and understanding the processes at the exit of the extrusion tool, the calibrator and in/ after the conditioning group of the solar absorber extrusion line. IFE's computational materials processing- and IT experts have developed and validated a digital representation of the digital twin for the extrusion process. This shows that it is possible to have a fast-responding Reduced Order Model (ROM), or Neural Network (NN) model predict key parameters of the production process. Both have been developed and validated. This will allow Inaventa to better understand their process, and to adjust the production parameters proactively in real-time, in response to the predictions made by these models. We succeded to get funding for a closely related Horizon Europe project (Flex4Fact.eu) together with IFE, SINTEF and 23 European partners, where Inaventa is one of 5 use cases. The FLEX4FACT project aims to develop an end-to-end ecosystem based on a modular and multi-level architecture to enable flexible manufacturing in industries and create the conditions for the necessary energy transition in energy intensive industrial sectors. One of the outcomes for SUCCEED from this European collaboration is the inspiration for an enhanced quality control system for Inaventa's production line, exceeding speed, precision and tracking possibility. It has already realised as a part of our DT and demonstrated by IFE and Inaventa during recent production trials. A positive and obvious side effect is that also the production line control has become easier and faster with the new IT tools, reducing rejection rate of costly raw material and saving operator man hours. When the digital twins are deployed and fully integrated into the production as a part of later work in this project, Inaventa are able to reduce the time it takes to fine-tune the process for each production batch, reduce waste and energy consumption. It will enable Inaventa to better plan and predict how much time each extrusion will require, and therefore also the energy consumption of the extrusion line.

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The aim of SUCCEED is to make high-volume production of our cutting-edge solar energy technology more cost-efficient and environmentally sustainable. This will be reached by developing a real-time Digital Twin of the production line that we integrate into the control system to obtain the required production precision and secure product quality. The introduction of high-performance polymers (HPP) for our technology aims to realize the great cost-reduction potential, overcome existing barriers and open for new applications and markets for solar heat production. SUCCEED presents a pioneering effort to realize the processing of HPPs to structured sheets by extrusion and lift it to an industrial process. Presently leading structured sheet providers lack suitable production lines to process our technology cost-efficiently and in the required quality. Extrusion of HPPs requires sophisticated control of the process conditions: Even small deviations in temperature or pressure lead to production issues such as die slag deposition, unfinished crystallization and high rejection rate. The focus of our work will be to understand, model and verify the critical parameters, and develop control and forecasting based on the digital twin of the production process. SUCCEED will solve this challenge in a joint effort with key expertise from research and industry: Expertise in modeling of industrial processes and Digital twin design (IFE-Institute of Energy Technology), life cycle and -cost assessment (Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems) together with central industry partners along the value chain: the solar energy technology owner (Inaventa Solar), the production line manufacturer (Omipa) and the material supplier of high-performance polymers (Solvay). Dissemination supported by the Norwegian Solar Energy Cluster. The outcome of this project will represent a game-changer for solar heat production and thus pushing the Green Transition with Norwegian solar technology.