CFD Analysis for Solar Chimney Power Plants

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was employed for in-vestigating Solar Chimney Power Plants (SCPP). The effect of the geometric dimensions on the fluid dynamics and heat trans-fer was investigated. The thermal efficiency of the collector was found to improve with increasing scale, due to an increase of the heat transfer coefficient. The spread in relevant Reynolds numbers for the collector and chimney was four orders of mag-nitude from the smallest to the largest scale. Parametric studies were also performed to determine the effect of the distance of the collector from the ground on the power output. An optimum distance was determined for two different scales. NOMENCLATURE A [m2] area cp [J/kgK] specific heat capacity D [m] chimney diamter g [m/s2] gravitational acceleration h [W/m2K] convective heat transfer coefficient H [m] collector height HT [m] tower height I [W/m2] solar irradiation K [W/mK] thermal conductivity m ̇ [kg/s] mass flux N [W] power Nu Nusselt Number p [N/m2] pressure q′ ′ [W/m2] heat flux R [m] collector radius Re Reynolds number T [K] temperature U [m/s] velocity ∗Correspondence to