Heat-Transfer Characteristics of Liquid Sodium in a Solar Receiver Tube with a Nonuniform Heat Flux

Jing Liu, Yongqing He and Xianliang Lei
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Jing Liu: School of Chemical Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650500, China
Yongqing He: School of Chemical Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650500, China
Xianliang Lei: State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 8, 1-16

Abstract: This paper presents a numerical simulation on the heat transfer of liquid sodium in a solar receiver tube, as the liquid sodium is a promising heat-transfer candidate for the next generation solar-power-tower (SPT) system. A comparison between three mediums—solar salt, Hitec and liquid sodium—is presented under uniform and nonuniform heat-flux configurations. We studied the effects of mass flow rate ( Q m ), inlet temperature ( T in ), and maximum heat flux ( q o max ), on the average heat-transfer coefficient ( h ) and the friction coefficient ( f ) of the three mediums. The results show that the h of liquid sodium is about 2.5 to 5 times than other two molten salts when T in is varying from 550 to 800 K, Q m is 1.0 kg/s, and q o max is 0.1 MW/m 2 . For maximum heat fluxes from 0.1 to 0.3 MW/m 2 , the h of liquid sodium is always an order of magnitude larger than that of Hitec and Solar-Salt (S-S), while maintaining a small friction coefficient.

Keywords: solar-power tower; liquid sodium; solar salt; Hitec; heat flux (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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