CFD analysis for solar chimney power plants

Abstract

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

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was employed for investigating Solar Chimney Power Plants (SCPP). The effect of the geometric dimensions on the fluid dynamics and heat transfer 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 magnitude 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.