Numerical simulation of the heat flux distribution in a solar cavity receiver

Abstract

In the solar tower power plant, the receiver is one of the main components of efficient concentrating solar collector systems. In the design of the receiver, the heat flux distribution in the cavity should be considered first. In this study, a numerical simulation using the Monte Carlo Method has been conducted on the heat flux distribution in the cavity receiver, which consists of six lateral faces and floor and roof planes, with an aperture of 2.0 m×2.0 m on the front face. The mathematics and physical models of a single solar ray’s launching, reflection, and absorption were proposed. By tracing every solar ray, the distribution of heat flux density in the cavity receiver was obtained. The numerical results show that the solar flux distribution on the absorbing panels is similar to that of CESA-I’s. When the reradiation from walls was considered, the detailed heat flux distributions were issued, in which 49.10% of the total incident energy was absorbed by the central panels, 47.02% by the side panels, and 3.88% was overflowed from the aperture. Regarding the peak heat flux, the value of up to 1196.406 kW/m² was obtained in the center of absorbing panels. These results provide necessary data for the structure design of cavity receiver and the local thermal stress analysis for boiling and superheated panels.

Key words： solar cavity receiver; Monte Carlo method; heat flux distribution

Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (No. 2006AA050103-1) and the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2010CB227102)

References

1 Yu Qizheng, Pan Yingchun, Zhang Donghui. Monte Carlo simulation of radiative heat transfer character in anisotropic medium. Journal of Engineering Thermophysics, 1996, 17(1): 96-100

2 Chen Y, Liou K N. A Monte Carlo method for 3D thermal infrared radiative transfer. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer, 2006, 101(1): 166-178

3 Wong B T, Mengüç M P. Monte Carlo methods in radiative transfer and electron-beam processing. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer, 2004, 84(4): 437-450

4 Walters D V, Buckius R O. Monte Carlo methods for radiative heat transfer in scattering media. In: Annual Review of Heat Transfer. 1994, 5: 131-176

5 Gentile N A. Implicit Monte Carlo diffusion-An acceleration method for Monte Carlo time-dependent radiative transfer simulations. Journal of Computational Physics, 2001, 172(2): 543-571

6 Howell J R. Application of Monte Carlo to heat transfer problems. In: Hartnett J P, Irvine T F, eds. Advances in Heat Transfer. Vol. 5. New York: Academic Press, 1968

7 Modest M F. Radiative Heat Transfer, 2nd ed. New York: Academic Press, 2003

8 Tang Heping. Numerical Simulation of Infrared Radiation Character and Transmission. Harbin Institute of Technology Press, 2006

9 Ruan Liming, Hao Jinmo, Tang Heping. Monte Carlo method to radiative transfer in two-dimensional scattering rectangular enclosures. Journal of Combustion Science and Technology, 2002, 8(5): 390-394

10 BakerA F, Faas S E, RadosevichL G, Skinrood A C, Peire J, Castro M, Presa J L. US-Spain Evaluation of the Solar One and CESA-I Receiver and Storage Systems. Sandia National Laboratories, USA, 1989