USASEC: Improved high-temperature receivers for dish concentrators

People

Lead

Associate Professor John Pye

Investigator

Collaborators

This project seeks development of the state of the art in understanding, predicting and managing thermal loss mechanisms for high-temperature solar thermal receivers. The emphasis is on dish concentrators, however the knowledge acquired has general application to tower receivers as well.

Electrically-heated air-based models (Fig. 1) as well as buoyancy-tank models with salty and fresh water are used to improve qualitative and quantitative understanding. In parallel, computational models of convective heat transfer are developed to allow modelling a broader range of cases than tested in the laboratory. The OpenFOAM software package is employed (Fig. 2). The ultimate objective is to develop a general-purpose model for prediction of cavity receiver heat loss for a wide range of solar concentrators. The convection, radiation, and optical ray-tracing models (Fig. 3) are integrated into multi-physics models used for the actual design of new protoype cavity receivers.