An efficient receiver tube enhanced by a solar transparent aerogel for solar power tower

Kai Ye, Qing Li, Yuanting Zhang, Yu Qiu and Bin Liu

Energy, 2022, vol. 261, issue PB

Abstract: This work attempts to enhance the solar energy harvesting in the solar power tower by designing a new receiver tube enhanced by a solar transparent aerogel. Initially, by establishing an optical-thermal model, the influences of the aerogel are studied, finding the optical efficiency decreases while the thermal efficiency increases with increasing aerogel thickness. Most importantly, the thermal efficiency can exceed 100% because heat transfers from the aerogel to the tube, which is beneficial for improving the receiver efficiency. Furthermore, the new receiver tubes with different aerogel thicknesses are compared with the traditional receiver tube under various typical conditions in the tower plant. After the comparison, the new receiver tube with 2 mm aerogel, which could enhance the receiver efficiency at any temperature when the irradiation is below 0.4 MW m−2, is selected as the optimized design. It is found that the receiver efficiency could be increased by 0.05–13.01 percentages when the temperature is within 563–838 K, and the irradiation is within 0.2–0.4 MW m−2. Finally, some suggestions to improve the receiver efficiency in the realistic tower plant are provided. The above results indicate that better performance can be achieved by applying the optimized new receiver tube in the tower plant.

Keywords: New receiver tube; Solar transparent aerogel; Efficiency improvement; Solar power tower; Optical-thermal sequential model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:261:y:2022:i:pb:s0360544222021971

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2022.125313

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