▪ This paper deals with the optimal integration of power plants including a storage device such as concentrated solar power plants. For such systems, numerous structures are possible, involving different number of heat exchangers, and for each of them, optimal operating temperatures to be found. Moreover, the heat storage system can be located at different temperature levels offering another degree of freedom when optimizing the whole system. If process simulators are nowadays very powerful tools for optimizing complex processes, they require to propose a primary design before any optimization steps. Finite-Dimension Thermodynamics (FDT) could help engineers to propose this primary design, close to the optimal one. To this aim, FDT method have been generalized for power generation systems including a storage device and any number of heat exchangers. An model of thermal storage system is also proposed which can be included in the FDT modelling. The optimization step consists in maximizing the power generation submitted to the thermodynamics constraints (first and second Laws) related to each heat exchangers, power block and thermal storage system. Remarkable results have been found: i) all the studied structures lead to the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency when optimized, ii) for the same driving source (same temperature and same power), the output power production varies with N -2 , N being the number of the heat exchangers, iii) Charge and discharged times scenarios have a big impact on the optimal operating temperatures and on the resulting daily energy production.
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