Numerical simulation of the heat flux distribution in a solar cavity receiver

Abstract

In the solar tower power plant, the receiver is one of the main components of efficient concentrating solar collector systems. In the design of the receiver, the heat flux distribution in the cavity should be considered first. In this study, a numerical simulation using the Monte Carlo Method has been conducted on the heat flux distribution in the cavity receiver, which consists of six lateral faces and floor and roof planes, with an aperture of 2.0 m×2.0 m on the front face. The mathematics and physical models of a single solar ray’s launching, reflection, and absorption were proposed. By tracing every solar ray, the distribution of heat flux density in the cavity receiver was obtained. The numerical results show that the solar flux distribution on the absorbing panels is similar to that of CESA-I’s. When the reradiation from walls was considered, the detailed heat flux distributions were issued, in which 49.10% of the total incident energy was absorbed by the central panels, 47.02% by the side panels, and 3.88% was overflowed from the aperture. Regarding the peak heat flux, the value of up to 1196.406 kW/m² was obtained in the center of absorbing panels. These results provide necessary data for the structure design of cavity receiver and the local thermal stress analysis for boiling and superheated panels.