Preliminary assessment of sCO2 cycles for power generation in CSP solar tower plants

Marco Binotti, Marco Astolfi, Stefano Campanari, Giampaolo Manzolini and Paolo Silva

Applied Energy, 2017, vol. 204, issue C, 1007-1017

Abstract: This work discusses a preliminary thermodynamic assessment of three different supercritical CO2 (sCO2) power cycles applied to a high temperature solar tower system, with maximum temperatures up to 800°C. The thermal power is transferred from the solar receiver to the power block through KCl-MgCl2 molten salts as heat transfer fluid, therefore an indirect cycle configuration is considered assuming a surrounded field as the one of Gemasolar plant. The most promising cycle configuration in terms of solar-to-electric efficiency is selected, optimizing the cycle turbine inlet temperature to achieve the best compromise between cycle and receiver performance: the highest efficiency at design conditions is achieved by the Recompression with Main Compression Intercooling (RMCI) configuration with a solar to electric efficiency of 24.5% and a maximum temperature of 750°C. The yearly energy yield of the proposed power plant is estimated with a simplified approach and results in the range of 18.4%: the performance decay from design to average yearly conditions is mostly due to the optical and thermal efficiencies reduction (−10.8% and −16.4%, respectively).

Keywords: sCO2 cycle; Supercritical CO2; Solar tower; Molten salts receiver; High temperature molten salts; KCl-MgCl2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261917306268
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:204:y:2017:i:c:p:1007-1017

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2017.05.121

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().