Abstract
The supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) power cycle is being considered for solar thermal central receiver systems in the United States. The cycle lends to increased high-temperature input that is expected of the next-generation concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) systems. Power block efficiencies of about 50% can be achieved for recompression cycles at an input temperature of approximately 720 °C. Additionally, the power block is compact and less complex, raising the possibility of using thermal-storage-coupled CSP sCO2 technologies for modular (~100 MW) peak-load power plants. Three pathways toward providing solar thermal input to the sCO2 cycle have been proposed by various research groups—the molten salt receiver pathway, the solid particle receiver pathway, and the gas-phase receiver pathway. The first two technologies have the advantage of sensible thermal storage within the solid/fluid medium passing through the receiver. In the gas receiver pathway, there is a need for coupling a sensible or latent heat storage technology. Several key technologies are needed to enable the realization of the sCO2 solar thermal technology, key among them being the receiver and thermal storage. In this chapter, some of the key gas-phase receiver technologies are discussed. The group’s past and recent work on the development of microchannel solar thermal receivers for sCO2 is emphasized.
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Acknowledgements
Financial support by DOE EERE grants #DE-EE0005801 and DE-EE0007108 is gratefully acknowledged. The work presented here represents the work of several students and their contributions are acknowledged here. The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of their colleagues, Drs. Kevin Drost and Sourabh Apte. Contributions of Christian Horend for cycle analysis, Eric Truong for sCO2 lab-scale receiver experiments, Charles Rymal for CFD simulations on the unit cell receiver, and Kyle Zada and Matthew Hyder for full-scale receiver design and analysis are acknowledged.
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Narayanan, V., M. Fronk, B., L’Estrange, T., Rasouli, E. (2019). Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Solar Thermal Power Generation—Overview of the Technology and Microchannel Receiver Development. In: Tyagi, H., Agarwal, A., Chakraborty, P., Powar, S. (eds) Advances in Solar Energy Research. Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3302-6_11
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