Analysis of radiation heat transfer and temperature distributions of solar thermochemical reactor for syngas production

Bachirou GUENE LOUGOU, Yong SHUAI, Xiang CHEN, Yuan YUAN, Heping TAN, Huang XING

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Front. Energy ›› 2017, Vol. 11 ›› Issue (4) : 480-492. DOI: 10.1007/s11708-017-0506-2
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Analysis of radiation heat transfer and temperature distributions of solar thermochemical reactor for syngas production

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Abstract

This paper investigated radiation heat transfer and temperaturedistributions of solar thermochemical reactor for syngas productionusing the finite volume discrete ordinate method (fvDOM) and P1 approximationfor radiation heat transfer. Different parameters including absorptivity,emissivity, reflection based radiation scattering, and carrier gasflow inlet velocity that would greatly affect the reactor thermalperformance were sufficiently investigated. The fvDOM approximationwas used to obtain the radiation intensity distribution along thereactor. The drop in the temperature resulted from the radiation scatteringwas further investigated using the P1 approximation. The results indicatedthat the reactor temperature difference between the P1 approximationand the fvDOM radiation model was very close under different operatingconditions. However, a big temperature difference which increasedwith an increase in the radiation emissivity due to the thermal non-equilibriumwas observed in the radiation inlet region. It was found that theincident radiation flux distribution had a strong impact on the temperaturedistribution throughout the reactor. This paper revealed that thetemperature drop caused by the boundary radiation heat loss shouldnot be neglected for the thermal performance analysis of solar thermochemicalreactor.

Keywords

solar thermochemical reactor / incident radiation flux / temperature distribution / radiation absorptivity / radiation emissivity / thermal performance analysis

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Bachirou GUENE LOUGOU, Yong SHUAI, Xiang CHEN, Yuan YUAN, Heping TAN, Huang XING. Analysis of radiation heat transfer and temperaturedistributions of solar thermochemical reactor for syngas production. Front. Energy, 2017, 11(4): 480‒492 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11708-017-0506-2

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National NaturalScience Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51522601 and 51421063) andthe program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (GrantNo. NCET-13-0173).

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2017 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbHGermany
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