Modelization of Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics in Solar Power Towers
Abstract
Solar thermal energy is becoming a very important renewable energy, with large scale plants operating in different parts of the world (NREL). The purpose of the current work is to describe the numerical model of a saturated steam solar receiver, that includes sub-models for heat conduction, two-phase flow, thermal radiation and turbulent natural convection using a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method. There are different designs for solar power collectors that are currently being used to generate electricity, like parabolic troughs, parabolic dishes and solar power towers. In a solar power tower, the solar radiation is reflected and concentrated by a field of mirrors into a receiver cavity. Inside this cavity, panels of tubes with circulating water receive this radiation and steam is produced. This steam is used to power turbines in order to generate electrical energy. The heat transfer and fluid dynamics phenomena in the receiver cavity are the interest of this study. Termofluids (Lehmkuhl et al., 2007), a new general purpose unstructured and parallel object-oriented CFD code developed to solve industrial flows is used in this work.