OpenCSP, a new platform for open code and data, launches during SolarPACES 2024

Sandia National Laboratories’ Concentrating Solar Power program recently launched OpenCSP, a collaborative environment for CSP code and data development. The new, open-source platform is comprised of source code, applications and data to enable collaborative development for the CSP community worldwide. The platform’s launch was announced this week during SolarPACES 2024 in Rome, Italy.

OpenCSP is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office through the Heliostat Consortium, and Sandia National Laboratories’ Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program to accelerate the transfer of CSP metrology and analysis tools to industry. OpenCSP aims to provide a resource for businesses supporting CSP, enhance CSP education, and offer a collaborative development environment, enabling teams to build advanced CSP applications more quickly and expedite their deployment.

“OpenCSP is intended to support rapid dissemination of high-quality CSP optical metrology and analysis capabilities, and also foster global collaboration to develop improved and new technology,” said Principal Investigator Randy Brost. “Concentrating solar mirrors can be tricky to design because it can be difficult to measure the required optical parameters. The goal of OpenCSP is to reduce barriers to access high quality metrology and analysis tools, to increase performance of concentrating solar power systems.”

According to Brost, OpenCSP includes the following components:

• OpenCSP_Code, which includes a development environment to support team collaboration.
• OpenCSP_Data, which provides large data sets for research and testing.
• OpenCSP_Mechanical, which includes an interactive CAD tool for designing deflectometry layouts.
• OpenCSP_Tools, to aid simple CSP analysis.
• OpenCSP_Documents, which supplies OpenCSP-related reports and presentations.

“OpenCSP is a team effort and is intentionally a work in progress,” said Brost. “We plan to add significant content in the future, and we hope it will provide a useful resource to the community. We invite others to contribute both code and data and join the development effort.” 

Learn more about the resources available through OpenCSP and the Heliostat Consortium.   

Contact OpenCSP@sandia.gov with questions.