Numerical and optical analysis of weather adaptable solar reactor

Abstract

Paper presented at the 9th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Malta, 16-18 July, 2012.

Solar energy is an abundant renewable energy resource that can be used to provide high process heat necessary to run thermo chemical processes for production of various solar fuels and commodities. In a solar reactor, sunlight is concentrated into a receiver through a small opening called the aperture. However, obtaining and maintaining semi-constant high temperatures inside a solar reactor is a challenge. This is because the incident solar radiation can fluctuate depending on the position of the sun and the weather conditions. For fixed aperture size reactors, changes in incident solar flux directly affect the temperature inside the reactor. This paper presents a novel solar reactor with variable aperture mechanism which is designed and manufactured at our lab. Radiation heat transfer analysis of this reactor concept is studied via Monte Carlo (MC) ray tracing. MC ray tracing module is coupled to a steady state onedimensional energy equation solver. Energy equation is solved for the wall and gas, accounting for the absorption, emission, and convection. Incoming direct flux values for a typical day are obtained from National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) database. Results show that for a perfectly insulated reactor, the average temperature of the working fluid may be kept appreciably constant throughout the day if aperture diameter is varied between 3 cm and 1.5 cm for incoming fluxes starting with 400 W/m2 at 05:12 am in the morning, reaching peak value of 981 W/m2 at noon, and eventually receiving 400 W/m2 at 6:58pm in the evening, which can make the solar reactor run about 13 hours continuously at 1500K semi-constant temperature.