China is the world leader in several areas of clean energy, but not in Concentrating Solar Power (CSP). Our analysis provides an interesting viewpoint to China's possible role in helping with the market breakthrough of CSP. We present a short overview of the state-of-the-art of CSP including the status in China. A blueprint for China's CSP development is elaborated based on China's 13th 5-year program, but also on China's previous success factors in PV and wind power. The results of this study suggest that China could play a more prominent global role in CSP, but this would require stronger efforts in several areas ranging from innovation to policies.
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The compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) is a highly interesting solar collector technology for different low-concentration applications due to no tracking requirement. The CPC with a tubular absorber is the most common type of CPC. Here, a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of this CPC type is presented, including design features, structure, applications, etc. Key design guidelines, structural improvements, and recent developments are also presented.
Here we propose a novel 2-stage dish concentrator system for concentrating solar power plants based on the so-called overlap method, which improves both the radial flux concentration ratio (β) and the intercept factor () of the concentrator. The 2-stage dish is composed of paraboloid primary and hyperboloid secondary mirrors having a special hollow structure enabling the mirrors to overlap, but avoiding excess shading. Geometric and optical analyses with ray-tracing show maximum values of β=15,498 and =0.78. Also, the size of the focal spot could be reduced. The concept is applicable for solar tower concepts enabling more compact unit mirrors and reducing the receiver size.
Here a new design of a cavity heat-pipe receiver for a 2-stage dish concentrator is proposed. Both optical and thermal simulations are used for the design and for performance evaluation of the cavity. The receiver was fitted to a conventional 2-stage and an improved (overlapped) 2-stage dish. The latter system configuration shows superior performance compared to the conventional one, in particular in terms of compact structure, uniformity of the incident flux and temperature distribution, and solar-to-thermal efficiency. The variance of the irradiation distribution at the cavity decreased by 25% and the largest adjacent temperature difference decreased by 54%. In total, the conversion efficiency increased from 61.3% to 68.6%. Moreover, the new receiver with the improved 2-stage dish concentrating system has less limits of scales (e.g. weight and volume) compared to the traditional single dish design.
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