Thermo‐environmental investigation of solar parabolic dish‐assisted multi‐generation plant using different working fluids

Abstract

The present study investigates the performance of a multi-generation plant by integrating a parabolic dish solar collector to a steam turbine and absorption chiller producing electricity and process heat and cooling. Thermodynamic modeling of the proposed solar dish integrated multi-generation plant is conducted using engineering equation solver to investigate the effect of certain operating parameters on the performance of the integrated system. The performance of the solar integrated plant is evaluated and compared using three different heat transfer fluids, namely, supercritical carbon dioxide, pressurized water, and Therminol-VPI. The useful heat gain by collector is utilized to drive a Rankine cycle to evaluate the network output, rate of process heat, cooling capacity, overall energetic, and exergetic efficiencies as well as coefficient of performance. The results show that water is an efficient working fluid up to a temperature of 550 K, while Therminol-VPI performs better at elevated temperatures (630 K and above). Higher integrated efficiencies are linked with the lower inlet temperature and higher mass flow rates. The integrated system using pressurized water as a heat transfer fluid is capable of producing 1278 and 832 kW of power output and process heat, respectively, from input source of almost 6121 kW indicating overall energy and exergy efficiencies of 34.5% and 37.10%, respectively. Furthermore, multi-generation plant is evaluated to assess the exergy destruction rate and steam boiler is witnessed to have the major contribution of this loss followed by the turbine. The exergo-environmental analysis is carried out to evaluate the impact of the system on its surroundings. Exergo-environmental impact index, impact factor, impact coefficient, and impact improvement are evaluated against increase in the inlet temperature of the collector. The single-effect absorption cycle is observed to have the energetic and exergetic coefficient of performances of 0.86 and 0.422, for sCO 2 operating system, respectively, with a cooling load of 228 kW.

Numerical Performance Investigation of Parabolic Dish Solar-Assisted Cogeneration Plant Using Different Heat Transfer Fluids

“…The heat transfer coefficient (h) of therminol VP1 is more stable at all the temperature levels, while for water, h is constant at lower temperatures and after 500 K, and it drops dramatically due to evaporation. Maximum value of density can be seen for oil at lower temperature, and a constant fall is found for sCO 2 as well, while water depicts a dramatic change after 550 K [41]. Thermal conductivity values in Figure 6(b) shows the similar tendency to that of viscosity; maximum k value can be seen at 400 K for water and a reduction can be observed afterwards.…”

“…A validated numerical mathematical model is developed with the help of the engineering equation solver (EES) [40]. The parabolic dish system presented in the present research is taken from Abid et al [41], whereas Rankine cycle is adopted from [42]. The complete detail of both the systems can be found in the respective references.…”

Performance study on a solar concentrator system for water distillation using different water nanofluids

“…The performance of a parabolic dish solar concentrator unit was compared according to the change in the cavity receiver and working fluid [ 24 ]. Three receivers were chosen: hemispherical, cylindrical and cubical, while the employed working fluids were water and Behran oil.…”

Experimental Study on Solar Heat Battery using Phase Change Materials for Parabolic Dish Collectors

“…Several researchers investigated concentrated collectors with a much focus on the poly-generation of producing heating, cooling, electricity, and green fuels (Abid et al, 2020;Aghaziarati et al, 2021;Yilmaz et al, 2020;Ghorbani et al, 2020;Shaikh et al, 2021). Such systems produce high overall conversion efficiency with integrated heat storage.…”