ENERGY AND EXERGY ANALYSIS FOR HELIOSTAT BASED SOLAR THERMAL POWER PLANT

Abstract

The increasing demand of energy, non-renewability of fossil fuels, dangerous environmental impact of fossil fuels forces the mankind to shift their source of energy from conventional fuels to renewable energy resources. Solar energy is the most adaptable source of energy because of its nature of all pervasiveness and free of cost. Although the solar photovoltaic and other technologies proves to be the most simple technologies for commercial uses but solar power tower technology is considered to be the best technology for industrial scale because of its very high efficiency and significant scope for improvement. In the literature review it is found that due to the popularity of the solar power tower technology lot of research paper giving enormous contribution in the advancement of this technology have been published. The steady state energy and exergy analysis of a typical solar power tower plant has considered but it was found in the earlier research work that the solar irradiation was taken constant. However the solar radiation are not constant as it varies depending upon various factors including Hour angle, Latitute of the place, sudden variations etc. It is therefore a need to consider the variation of the solar irradiance and then analyse the performance of such plant under variable conditions of solar radiation. In the proposed work a mathematical model of the solar tower power plant has been developed involving the various laws of thermodynamics and heat transfer. The execution of the model has been done on the Microsoft Excel 2014 and the results have been derived in the graphical form as well as tabular form. An attempt has also been made to validate the results obtained by simulation with the results of performance of DAHAN solar power tower plant situated at Beijing China available in the literature. It is concluded that the energy and exergy analysis for the performance of solar power tower plant may be used to predict the performance of other such plants.