Mr Michael Rae

Mr Michael Rae is a computer scientist who joined CSIRO in 2006 after working in the commercial IT industry, initially working in the modelling and sampling of industrial atmospheric pollutants primarily from power stations, roadways, and mines along with the simulation of energy and grid systems.

After moving into solar thermal research in 2009 he has worked across various physical domain computing environments including process control, microelectronics, instrumentation and system modelling. Since then he has contributed to most of CSIRO’s pilot scale solar thermal projects including design, construct, and operation of high temperature experimental plant. These plant have included SolarGas, Supercritical Steam, Supercritical CO2, Air Turbines, Thermal Energy Storage, and Falling Particle systems.

His work in heliostats is primarily in the electronic and software control area having worked on the development of CSIRO’s microelectronics package, firmware, tracking analysis, calibration, and machine vision systems both across the hardware and software domains.

He is currently the leader of CSIRO’s Solar Thermal Optics team comprising of engineers and scientists across the computing, mechanical, and mechatronics domain.