A method for experimental thermo-mechanical aging of materials submitted to concentrated solar irradiation

Concentrated Solar Technology can produce process heat, power and fuels from solar energy in the temperature range 150-1500 degrees C, bringing the question of the receiver ability to reliably perform over the expected lifetime. Conventional methods commonly used to assess the mechanical stability and lifetime involve in-door laboratory testing, which suffers from the fundamental inability to reproduce the real operating conditions. A previous work introduced an original experimental setup based on acoustic emission named IMPACT (In situ thermo-Mechanical Probe by ACoustic Tracking), designed for an in situ and passive characterization of receiver materials under harsh thermo-mechanical stresses. This paper proposes an original method, based on a modelling approach, to control the sample damage amplification with IMPACT, and assess its relevance through an experimental campaign on two selected materials (SiC and Inconel 625).