Floating Solar Chimney Technology

Abstract

1.1 Floating Solar Chimney technology description The purpose of this chapter is to present the Floating solar chimney (FSC) technology, look for the site www.floatingsolarchimney.gr, in order to explain its principles of operation and to point out its various significant benefits. This technology is the advisable one for candidacy for large scale solar electricity generation especially in desert or semi desert areas of our planet and a major technology for the global warming elimination. The solar chimney power plants are usually referred to as solar updraft towers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower) and the related solar chimneys are huge reinforced concrete structures. However due to the high construction cost of the concrete solar chimneys the solar up-draft tower technology is expensive demanding a high initial investment in comparison to its competitive solar technologies. Their solar up-draft towers are huge structures of high initial investment cost that can not be split into small units. That is possible for the relatively also expensive PV solar technology. Also the solar updraft technology is far more expensive compared to the conventional fossil fueled power plants of similar electricity generation. That is why the solar chimney technology has not yet been applied although it is a solar technology of many advantages. The Floating Solar Chimney (FSC) is a fabric low cost alternative of the concrete solar chimney up-draft towers that can make the Floating Solar Chimney technology cost competitive in comparison not only with the renewable electricity generation technologies but also with the conventional fossil fueled electricity generation technologies. Also the FSC technology is cost effective to be split into small units of several MW each. The Floating Solar Chimney Power Plant, named by the author as Solar Aero-Electric Power Plant (SAEP) due to its similarity to the Hydro-Electric power plant, is a set of three major components: • The Solar Collector. It is a large greenhouse open around its periphery with a transparent roof supported a few meters above the ground. • The Floating Solar Chimney (FSC). It is a tall fabric cylinder placed at the centre of the solar collector through which the warm air of the greenhouse, due to its relative buoyancy to the ambient air, is up-drafting. • The Turbo-Generators. It is a set of air turbines geared to appropriate electric generators in the path of up-drafting warm air flow that are forced to rotate generating electricity. The gear boxes are adjusting the rotation speed of the air turbines to the generator rotation speed defined by the grid frequency and their pole pairs. Source: Solar Energy, Book edited by: Radu D. Rugescu, ISBN 978-953-307-052-0, pp. 432, February 2010, INTECH, Croatia, downloaded from SCIYO.COM