Dimensional investigation of solar chimney power plant based on numerical and experimental results

Abstract

• Construction of prototype solar chimney and recording air flow temperature and velocity data under different solar radiation. • 3D numerical simulation of the base case using FLUENT software and validation of the results with the experimental results obtained in this study and also validation with other researcher's numerical and experimental results. • Investigation of the fluid behavior pattern inside the solar chimney and system performance based on the simulation results under different geometric parameters. In this study, a pilot solar chimney power plant (SCPP) with a chimney height of 4 m and a collector diameter of 5 m was constructed. Main purpose of this research is identification and optimization of the system based on regional climatic experimental data which recorded from constructed solar chimney with new dimensions to utilize in our future studies. So that future studies can be conducted based on a suitable platform. Performance evaluation of solar chimney was simulated under different geometric configurations through a 3D axisymmetric incompressible steady computational fluid dynamics solver by applying k - ε turbulence model. For a better performance comparison of the SCPP between different geometries, air velocity and system output power were calculated for all states. The results showed that a higher collector radius and chimney radius increased the ​​air outflow velocity in the collector, whereas a higher collector height had a negative effect. According to the results, configurations with collector height of 5 cm have the highest velocity values compared to the others and the maximum power value of 1.74 W can be achieved for the collector inlet height of 15 cm and the chimney radius of 0.4 m.