The H2020 SFERA-III project, in which Euronovia is a partner, offers free access for researchers to 47 installations in the field of Concentrated Solar Power across Europe. The 2nd campaign for transnational access is open until January 31, 2020.
SFERA-III: Research infrastructures in Concentrated Solar Power
SFERA-III (Solar Facilities for the European Research Area) is a H2020 project funded under the Infrastructures Programme. With a total budget of EUR 9,1 million over 4 years, the project gathers 15 partners from 8 European Union countries and Turkey. One of the main objectives of the project is to facilitate access to Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) infrastructures for researchers.
Every year, SFERA-III opens a call for CSP research proposals. The 2nd transnational access campaign opened on November 12, 2019. This call for projects offers free access to 13 state-of-art research infrastructures and 47 solar energy installations in 8 countries:
- Cyprus (Cyprus Institute) ;
- France (CNRS-PROMES and CEA) ;
- Germany (DLR and Fraunhofer)
- Italy (ENEA) ;
- Portugal (LNEG and University of Evora) ;
- Spain (CIEMAT-PSA, IMDEA Energy and UAL-CIESOL) ;
- Switzerland (ETH Zurich) ;
- Turkey (METU).
The selected projects will benefit from 1 to 4 weeks of free access to the chosen facilities for a team of up to 2 persons. Moreover, travel, accommodation and subsistence costs are reimbursed by the project’s budget.
Over 100 services offered for Transnational Access
The call for transnational access projects covers a wide spectrum of experiments with more than 100 services in Concentrated Solar Power, such as:
- Solar thermal electricity generation (tests from research on components and methods to full prototypes systems),
- Solar fuels production,
- Cycles for chemical storage of solar energy for short and long duration,
- Solar water treatment,
- Solar heating and cooling of buildings to improve energy efficiency,
- Modelling and controlling of concentrating solar technologies for power plants and for industrial processes,
- High value material synthesis and/or coatings deposits (experimental or test of processes),
- High-flux photochemistry and photo-physics,
- Characterisation of materials behaviour and properties under extreme conditions,
- Solar pumping of LASER for industrial and space applications.
More information about all SFERA-III services here.
How to submit your project to the SFERA-III call?
The first step before submitting a proposal is to check the technical feasibility to the installations. Therefore, for technical questions and before writing your proposal, you have to send an e-mail to the Access Manager of the chosen Research Infrastructure (list and contact of Access Managers here).
Once the technical feasibility is validated, fill in the SFERA-III Application Form which includes all the following information:
- Project title,
- Project acronym,
- Scientific field,
- The installation requested for access (for application to more than one installation, please send separate proposals),
- Proposer (name, gender, nationality, home institution…),
- Brief CV of the group leader, including a short list of the most relevant papers,
- Short explanation identifying the research team,
- A PDF file of the description of the research proposed project.
In order to help you submit your proposal to the transnational access campaign, the SFERA-III team will organise a webinar on January 9, 2020 at 11:00 am (register here). In the meantime, you can download the presentation about the 2019 campaign here.
The deadline for submission is January 31, 2020. The list of selected projects will be published in May 2020.