Radiative heat transfer modelling in a concentrated solar energy bubbling fluidized bed receiver using the Monte Carlo Method

Abstract

According to recent studies in the solar energy community, a promising ways of solar energy conversion seems to be the beam down concentration technology associated to a fluidized bed receiver. The advantage of this system is its ability to heat air at temperature reaching 1000 K in a receiver directly exposed to a concentrated solar beam and integrated in a thermodynamic cycle. This paper focus on the modelling of radiative heat transfer from the optical concentrator to the receiver by taking into account absorption and multiple scattering of light in the particles bed. To achieve this objective, we develop in this work an efficient tool based on an algorithm solving the integral formulation of the Radiative Transfer Equation by the Monte Carlo Method. This algorithm is implemented in EDStaR environment where computer graphics libraries, parallel computing and specific functionalities to produce statistical quantities and their associated derivatives are available. One of the main advantage of the proposed radiative transfer modelling is the determination of the sensitivities (derivatives) of the physical quantities to any physical or geometrical parameter without significant additional CPU time.