On the Design and Evaluation of Open Volumetric Air Receiver for Process Heat Applications

Abstract

India receives abundant radiant energy from the sun on account being located in the equatorial solar belt. Especially, an annual global solar radiation of about ≥2400 kWh/m2 is received in Rajasthan and northern Gujarat. It can be harnessed, for instance, using linear and point focusing based concentrated solar thermal concepts. Parabolic trough and linear Fresnel based technologies belong to the first and heliostat based power tower and parabolic dish technologies belong to the latter category. As a part of research initiative at IIT Jodhpur heliostat based concentrated solar tower concept using an open volumetric air receiver concept is preferred to achieve a high temperature. This can be employed as process heat. This technology includes sub-system, such as, thermal energy storage, and heat rejection/exchange systems. In particular, the presented paper describes the design, development and evaluation of an open volumetric air receiver. A computational fluid dynamics tool, namely, ANSYS-FLUENT is utilized for evaluation purpose. The obtained hot air (heat transfer fluid) can be employed, for instance, in metal processing applications.The presented design aspects of the open volumetric air receiver are:•The flow instability in an open volumetric air receiver;•Influence of material property on modeling of open air receiver;•Heat transfer experiment with a porous body;•Design and evaluation of a mixer to obtain an uniform temperature at the open volumetric air receiver outlet;•Design and evaluation of a re-circulating air injection system.Finally, a 4kWth experimental facility, which is being commissioned at IIT Jodhpur to test solar thermal sub-systems, such as, receiver, heat exchanger, thermal energy storage is also discussed, in brief.