Developing and improving a prototype scale concentrating solar power tower-system

Abstract

The study aims to demonstrate the model and construction of a short scope concentrating solar power tower (CSP) model that has been built in Jeddah at King Abdul-Aziz University Saudi Arabia. This prototype generates electricity using solar energy. The study employed ten heliostats for directing the solar energy towards a solar receiver. A molten salt was used that comprised of 40% KNO3 and 60% NaNO3. The study presents theoretical, experimental, and economic aspects of solar towers with a simplified theory of the solar tower. The finite element study through ANSYS was performed to compute the through analytic division of temperature in the receiver. The highest temperature from the simulation was 521 °C., The heat power, dispensed via molten was 12.52 kW during the heat exchanger. However, 13 kW was the design thermal power. While about 3.7% was the percentage error in the thermal power. The study offers fundamental economic data and identifies technical issues that will be useful in installing commercial solar tower in the country. Artificial Neural Network model was applied on the Daily variation of solar flux–full tracking, and as a result, the Gaussian2D model trained with R2 = 0.90698 and the Lorentz2D model trained with R2 = 0.99988.