A computational approach to simulate the optical and thermal performance of a novel complex geometry solar tower molten salt cavity receiver

Using CFD and ray tracing to estimate the heat losses of a tubular cavity dish receiver for different inclination angles

“…Earlier work using CFD analysis of the dish receiver by Craig et al (2015aCraig et al ( , 2015b employed finite-volume ray tracing (Craig et al, 2015a) and Monte Carlo ray tracing with a crude approximation of the complex geometry using circular elements (Craig et al, 2015b). Recent work by Slootweg et al (2019) and Slootweg (2019) paved the way for using irregular triangular and quadrilateral elements in SolTrace to describe any complex receiver shape accurately, thereby generating an accurate solar absorption distribution in the receiver as input to conjugate heat transfer modelling using CFD. The Slootweg approach was also followed and is described in this paper.…”

“…The method developed by Slootweg et al (2019) and Slootweg (2019) was used here to replace the hot burner inlet with an on-sun condition, i.e. the HTF air entered at a lower temperature and then was heated by the concentrated solar irradiation of the dish focused on the receiver aperture.…”

“…15 with the equations for the transformation explained in Appendix A. The code used to convert the mesh file into input files for SolTrace is given in Appendix C, and the script to simulate the model in SolTrace is given in Appendix D. More details regarding the method can be found in Slootweg (2019). 2019), where a complex geometry surface is approximated by converting a computational mesh to irregular triangular elements to be used in SolTrace.…”

“…Figure 15Schematic illustrating the method developed bySlootweg et al (2019) andSlootweg (2019), where a complex geometry surface is approximated by converting a computational mesh to irregular triangular elements to be used in SolTrace. A flux distribution is determined by applying the average absorbed ray of an element and applying the average value to the centroid of the element.…”

Optical Performance Comparison of Different Shapes of Cavity Receiver in the Fixed Line-Focus Solar Concentrating System

“…The result indicated that the aperture blades captured 54% of intercepted surplus power. Slootweg et al [17] presented a complex geometry solar tower molten salt cavity receiver and investigated its optical and thermal performance. It was found that optical efficiencies of the In addition, many researchers have analyzed the influence of cavity receiver parameters on the system's optical performance.…”