Fuel Production Using Concentrated Solar Energy

Abstract

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/54057 . IntroductionLimited reserves of fossil fuels and their negative environmental effects impose significant problems in our energy security and sustainability. Consequently, researchers are looking for renewable energy sources, for instance solar energy, to meet the energy demands of a growing world population. However, terrestrial solar energy is a dilute resource per footprint area and is intermittent showing substantial variability depending on the season, time of the day, and location.One strategy to overcome these drawbacks of solar energy is to concentrate and use it for cleaning and upgrading dirty fuels such as coal and other hydrocarbons or converting renewable feedstocks such as biomass into carbon-neutral solar fuels. In this way, the intermittent and dilute solar energy can be concentrated and stored as a chemical fuel which can be easily integrated to our existing energy infrastructure. These advantages of solar fuels produced with concentrated solar radiation make them an attractive solution in our quest for renewable and clean fuels. Figure shows the energy potential and carbon emissions by most commonly used fuels along with solar hydrogen.Most common and available methods for solar fuel production are thermolysis, cracking, reforming, gasification and through thermochemical cycles. "ll these methods require high temperatures to produce solar fuel. Therefore, in these methods, there are some qualities of the feedstock or the reactor that need to be satisfied to attain high temperatures and efficient solar fuel production. For instance, the physical size and porosity of the feedstock play an important role. "s the surface area-to-volume ratio of the feedstock increases, more reaction sites will be available for the reaction to occur, which increases the process efficiency. The feedstock should also have a narrow bad gap to lower the energy requirement for chemical process. "dditionally, the material on the reactor walls should have high optical absorption to increase the temperature of the reactor and withstand high temperatures, and the win-

Comparison between Hydrogen and Syngas Fuels in an Integrated Micro Gas Turbine/Solar Field with Storage

“…Furthermore, we are witnessing a great variety of gas turbine-based hybrid power plants that combine two or more power generating devices and make use of the synergism to generate maximum power and heat recovery, thus offering high efficiencies. In this regard, for small-scale, distributed energy application, hybrid systems based on the integration between solar field and gas turbine (GT) technologies are recognized as a very interesting solution [1][2][3][4][5][6].…”