Solar-Driven Thermochemical Production of Sustainable Liquid Fuels from H2O and CO2 in a Heliostat Field

A Method for Determination of the Transmission Efficiency of a Silica Optical Fiber Cable Using a Solar Power Tower

“…The optical fiber bundle/cable was installed at the Very High Concentration Solar Tower (VHCST) facility, at IMDEA Energy (Móstoles, Madrid, Spain). The VHCST has a customized heliostat field composed of 169 single-facet tilt-roll heliostats of 3 m 2 (1.6 m × 1.9 m) with focal lengths of 20 and 30 m. Further details about this testing facility can be found in works by Romero et al [39,40] and Martínez-Hernández et al [41]. Due to the Due to the way the inlet terminal was designed and protected, the concentrated solar energy was expected to be delivered to the individual fiber cores without significant losses to the cladding matrix forming the cable, so the temperature should not have been raised due to the passage of light (radiation heat losses in the fibers should be negligible).…”

“…The optical fiber bundle/cable was installed at the Very High Concentration Solar Tower (VHCST) facility, at IMDEA Energy (Móstoles, Madrid, Spain). The VHCST has a customized heliostat field composed of 169 single-facet tilt-roll heliostats of 3 m 2 (1.6 m × 1.9 m) with focal lengths of 20 and 30 m. Further details about this testing facility can be found in works by Romero et al [39,40] and Martínez-Hernández et al [41]. Due to the low acceptance angle of the optical fiber cable, only some selected heliostats of the VHCST facility were used in this analysis (see Figure 4 and Section 3.4).…”

Synergies between Direct Air Capture Technologies and Solar Thermochemical Cycles in the Production of Methanol

“…A simplified flow diagram of the whole production of synthetic fuel can be found in Figure 4, while the complete flowsheet and stream table are available in Supplementary Materials. The oxidation (R-101 and R-201) and reduction reactors (R-102 and R-202) are based on a layout from literature [22,42] and have been implemented in Aspen Plus ® with the conversion reactor model (RStoic). For the feasibility of the process simulation with this software, the recommended arrangement performs the reduction and oxidation in different isothermal reactors, where temperature and pressure are constant, while the metal oxide is transferred between them.…”

“…To avoid simulation difficulties caused by different thermodynamic and kinetic properties, the equipment is duplicated to perform WS and CDS separately [18,43]. The work from Bulfin et al was used to determine the oxidation and reduction extent as well as the H2O or CO2 con- The oxidation (R-101 and R-201) and reduction reactors (R-102 and R-202) are based on a layout from literature [22,42] and have been implemented in Aspen Plus ® with the conversion reactor model (RStoic). For the feasibility of the process simulation with this software, the recommended arrangement performs the reduction and oxidation in different isothermal reactors, where temperature and pressure are constant, while the metal oxide is transferred between them.…”

“…Since both reactors operate at considerably high temperatures (between 1500 and 900 • C), heat losses are not neglectable. As a consequence, the oxidation reactor is often operated without refrigeration even though reactions (1) and ( 2) are exothermal and the reduction reactor must be irradiated with concentrated sunlight to compensate the endothermicity of reaction (3) and the heat losses [42]. To avoid simulation difficulties caused by different thermodynamic and kinetic properties, the equipment is duplicated to perform WS and CDS separately [18,43].…”