a b s t r a c tA study is reported of the potential performance of dry cooling on power generation. This is done in the context of a generic trough solar thermal power plant. The commercial power plant analysis code GateCycle is applied for this purpose. This code is used to estimate typical performance of both wet and dry cooling options. Then it is configured to estimate the performance of ideal wet and dry cooling options. The latter are defined as the condenser temperature being at the ambient wet bulb temperature or dry bulb temperature, respectively. Yearly power production of a solar power plant located in Las Vegas is presented for each of the cooling options. To move further toward approaching the possible improvement in dry cooling, the impact of a high-performance heat exchanger surface is evaluated. It is found that higher efficiency generation compared to current dry cooling designs is definitely possible. In fact the performance of these types of systems can approach that of wet cooling system units.

The southwestern US is an ideal location for solar power plants due to its abundant solar resource, while there is a difficulty in implementing wet cooling systems due to the shortage of water in this region. Dry cooling could be an excellent solution for this, if it could achieve a high efficiency and low cost as wet cooling. Some dry cooling systems are currently in operation, and investigations of their performance have been reported in the literature. This paper looks into the limits to the power production implicit in dry cooling, assuming that improvements might be made to the system components. Use of higher performance heat transfer surfaces is one such possible improvement. We have developed a model of a fairly typical, but simplified, solar trough plant, and simulated thermodynamic performance of this with the software Gatecycle. We have examined the power generation and cycle efficiency of the plant for the Las Vegas vicinity with conventional wet cooling and conventional dry cooling cases considered separately using this software. TMY2 data are used for this location for this purpose. Similarly, the same studies are carried out for “ideal” cooling systems as a comparison. We assumed that in the ideal dry cooling system, the condensing temperature is the ambient dry bulb temperature, and in the ideal wet cooling system, it is the ambient wet bulb temperature. It turned out that the ideal dry cooling system would significantly outperform the conventional wet cooling system, indicating the possibility of the dry cooling system being able to achieve increased performance levels with component improvements.