Principal Investigator

K   Lovegrove Engineering, FEIT, ANU

Project Title

Investigation of Natural and Force Convection Losses from Cavity Receivers in Solar Dish Application

Brief Description for General Publications

The present research is undertaking the numerical investigation of natural convection loss occuring in the variety of cavity receivers employed in the solar concentration dish. Flow and heat transfer simulations are carried out with the aid of commerical CFD software package, Fluent 6.0. Three different receiver geometries have been considered so far, one of which is the experimental model for validation. The other two are essentially the ones currently used in ANU 20 m2 and 400 m2 dishes. A good agreement between experimental and numerical results was obtained. Furthermore, the numerical results of all receivers were qualitatively comparable to the predictions by other available correlations hitherto. A new simplified correlation is proposed. The combined free-forced convection study, i.e. that includes the effect of wind speed and direction on convection loss, is also being undertaken. Several cases of varying wind incident angles are considered and some typical results are presented in graphical form.