The Structure and Foundation Design for Small Solar Thermal Dish Stirling 10 kW Power Plant for Thailand Softland and Poor Isolation Nature

Due to the moist and humid climate weather in Thailand, it is longer than six months of rainy season each year. Thailand is thus one of the many other countries in the world that has medium insolation, the average per year at 500 W/m2. Furthermore, the whole country sit on a very soft-land flat plateau. Since the Siam Solar Dish prototype was setup and tested at Naraesuan University in Pitsanulok Province and at AREF in Bangkok, Thailand, it became apparent that the design of her support structure together with her concrete foundation also represents a complicate part of these research activities. In Thailand, a parabolic dish structure is under development for various applications in between the 300–600 °C temperature range in solar fields up to several kilowatts range. The detail in this paper is one part of the solar thermal dish Stirling for a 10 kW power plant with lead acid battery storage in Thailand, namely the “Siam Solar Dish I” research project. This paper is the only one part of the main of this research project about Siam Solar Dish System effort in Thailand. That will explain the dish structure’s design structure and its foundation, which is suitable for Thailand’s soft land environmental nature. Parabolic dish systems normally feature different structural types in terms of their performance and durability. In order to implement a successful parabolic dish system, it thus became obvious by this nature that the design of each dish structure is quite important and vital to conduct a particular design calculation to match and suit with its individual installation location. This particular part of the research project activities is to design the requirement lightweight support structure, along with the parabolic dish structural design work, and the concrete foundation suitable to the soft land country like Thailand. The design effort continue to consider additional relevance topics, like the economized cost, the structural durability, and easy to control, together with the low maintenance cost to trade off with the required light weight structure.