Optical and thermal performance of bladed receivers

Abstract

Abstract. Bladed receivers use conventional receiver tube-banks rearranged into bladed/finned structures, and offer better light trapping, reduced radiative and convective losses, and reduced tube mass, based on the presented optical and thermal analysis. Optimising for optical performance, deep blades emerge. Considering thermal losses leads to shallower blades. Horizontal blades perform better, in both windy and no-wind conditions, than vertical blades, at the scales considered so far. Air curtains offer options to further reduce convective losses; high flux on blade-tips is still a concern.

Numerical analysis of a hybrid tubular and cavity air receiver for solar thermal applications

“…Parameters varied were Ra (10 4 ,10 6 ), θ (0,10) and ϵ (0,1) and the variation of Nu with Ra was plotted for different cavity inclinations and surface emissivity. Another coupled optical and thermal analysis of a bladed receiver concept (Pye et al , 2016) was performed using an open-source ray-tracing code Tracer for obtaining flux distribution that was coupled with OpenFOAM finite volume-based code to obtain the velocity and temperature distributions. Numerical analysis of a high-temperature cavity receiver was presented that used liquid tin as the HTF (DeAngelis et al , 2018), implementing ray tracing using LightTools software package for obtaining spatially resolved flux profile which was then coupled with COMSOL Multiphysics software package for obtaining the temperature and velocity distributions in the two-dimensional receiver model.…”