A review of the application performances of concentrated solar power systems

•Current context of concentrated solar power.•Summarise and analyse the main degradation mechanisms.•Main techniques to detect, prevent and mitigate the main faults.•A novel qualitative and quantitative analysis of the literature is provided.•Current and future challenges in application performances of concentrated solar power. The global energy production model is changing from fossil fuels to renewable and nuclear energies. Concentrated solar power is one of the growing technologies that is leading this process. This growth implies the sophistication and size of the systems and, therefore, it requires an increase in maintenance tasks to ensure reliability, availability, maintainability and safety. The aim of this paper is to describe the current context of concentrated solar power, to summarise and analyse the main degradation mechanisms and the main techniques to detect, prevent and mitigate these faults. An exhaustive literature study is presented, considering the most advanced techniques and approaches. A novel qualitative and quantitative analysis of the literature is provided. Finally, the current trends and the future challenges in this field are gathered from this study.