Numerical Simulation Of The Receiver For Tower Solar Thermal

Energy, as one of the major power of human society and culture, plays an important role during the society progress.In the last century, coal, oil, natural gas and other fossil fuel was used into the industry development rapidly. However, conventional source of energy, as coal, oil and natural gas are, face the problem that the amount of storage declines while the amount of energy to supply arises, which brings a big challenge to the condition of the energy that will be used in the future. Solar energy is one of the most abundant energy stored in the earth, marked by its inexhaustible supply, and attracts a lot of attention. In fact, it has been regarded as one of the most promising way among all the renewable energy productions.This paper mainly focuses on the flow and heat transfer characteristics numerical simulation of the absorber, which is one of the vital components in the Molten salt tower solar power system. The main work of this paper shows as follows:(1)The flow and heat transfer characteristics numerical simulation of the absorber was established based on the conservation of energy, conservation of Momentum and conservation of mass.(2)The flow and heat transfer characteristics numerical simulation of the absorber under different conditions of inlet temperature, flow, diameter, heat flux and wall thickness using Fluent.The following conclusions in the conditions considered in this paper were obtained by the numerical simulation of the parameters:the higher temperature leads to the greater heat loss and thus the smaller temperature difference between the import and export; the best heat transfer performance can be obtained when the speed is less than2m/s; the temperature change rate of import and export decreases with the increasing diameter of the entrance; a linear relationship of the temperature difference between inlet and outlet with the heating surface heat flux increasing can be obtained; that the inside and outside wall temperature rapidly increase with the rising wall thickness; the convective heat transfer coefficient between the wall and the circumstance is influenced by the environmental wind speed, and thus the radiating wall is affected in positive relationship with the wind speed; the rising roughness leads to the increasing turbulent kinetic energy; the temperature difference between the import and export has been increasing with the rising tube length.