Abstract
A solar chimney power plant (SCPP) is a renewable-energy power plant that transforms solar energy into electricity. The SCPP consists of three essential elements – solar air collector, chimney tower, and wind turbine(s). The present work is aimed at optimizing the geometry of the major components of the SCPP using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS-CFX to study and improve the flow characteristics inside the SCPP. The overall chimney height and the collector diameter of the SCPP were kept constant at 10m and 8m respectively. The collector inlet opening was varied from 0.05m to 0.2m. The collector outlet diameter was also varied from 0.6m to 1m. These modified collectors were tested with chimneys of different divergence angles (0°–3°) and also different chimney inlet openings of 0.6m to 1m. The diameter of the chimney was also varied from 0.25m to 0.3m. Based on the CFX computational results, the best configuration was achieved using the chimney with a divergence angle of 2° and chimney diameter of 0.25m together with the collector opening of 0.05m and collector outlet diameter of 1m. The temperature inside the collector is higher for the lower opening resulting in a higher flow rate and power.
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