Analysis of the turbulent heat transfer in solar power tower molten salt receiver tube

Abstract

Central Receiver System (CRS) with molten salt (MS) technology represents the most cost effective and leading candidate technology for electricity generation for stand-alone Solar Power Plants. But MS has a high freezing point, and the tube alloy also can not stand long time with high temperature in MS circumstances. Tube freezing, leaking and salt decomposing are very likely to happen during the operation, especially under the unstable and non-uniform solar incidence flux. The conventional heat transfer correlations are not well available to deal with the MS receiver, for the heat flux are inconstant and non-uniform and only heat one side of the receiver tube, and the thermal properties of MS are also changed with temperature. By using a commercial CFD software FLUENT, this paper presents the results and analysis of the heat transfer in MS receiver tube with steady non-uniform heat flux around the circumference. This results will do some help to the 100kW MS receiver design and fabrication in the next step in DAHAN SPT project.