Jose Zapata

Integration of Monte-Carlo ray tracing with a stochastic optimisation method: application to the design of solar receiver geometry.

A stochastic optimisation method adapted to illumination and radiative heat transfer problems involving Monte-Carlo ray-tracing is presented. A solar receiver shape optimisation case study illustrates the advantages of the method and its potential: efficient receivers are identified using a moderate computational cost.

Development of a higher-efficiency tubular cavity receiver for direct steam generation on a dish concentrator

An integrated model for an axisymmetric helical-coil tubular cavity receiver is presented, incorporating optical ray-tracing for incident solar flux, radiosity analysis for thermal emissions, computational fluid dynamics for external convection, and a one-dimensional hydrodynamic model for internal flow-boiling of water. A receiver efficiency of 98.7% is calculated, for an inlet/outlet temperature range of 60–500 °C, which is the ratio of fluid heating to receiver incident irradiance. The high-efficiency design makes effective use of non-uniform flux in its non-isothermal layout, matching lower temperature regions to areas of lower flux. Full-scale testing of the design will occur in late 2015.

Experimental testing of a high-flux cavity receiver

A new tubular cavity receiver for direct steam generation, ‘SG4’, has been built and tested on-sun based on integrated optical and thermal modelling. The new receiver achieved an average thermal efficiency of 97.1±2.1% across several hours of testing, and reduced the losses by more than half, compared to the modelled performance of the previous SG3 receiver and dish. Near-steady-state outlet steam temperatures up to 560°C were achieved during the tests.

Full state feedback control of steam temperature in a once-thorough direct steam generation receiver powered a paraboloidal dish

DSG plants in a once-through configuration convert water into superheated steam suitable for a steam turbine, with a single pass of the fluid through the receiver. The control problem is to manipulate the feed-water mass flow to maintain a desired steam condition (e.g. temperature) under variable solar radiation. This paper presents a full state linear feedback controller for the steam temperature for a once-through direct steam generation system, featuring a 500 m2 paraboloidal dish concentrator and a mono-tube cavity receiver at the Australian National University. The controller manipulates the feed-water mass flow at the receiver inlet to maintain a predetermined specific enthalpy at the receiver outlet, compensating for variations in direct normal irradiation (DNI) and other ambient conditions. The linear controller features three separate regulation mechanisms: a feedforward law to anticipate changes in DNI; a full state feedback loop that uses a state observer for the receiver and an additional output feedback integrator loop for robustness. Experimental results show that the linear controller can successfully control the temperature of the SG4 receiver, provided that it is adequately tuned.Copyright

Improved Tubular Receivers for Point-focus Concentrators

Optics, thermal emissions, convection and internal flow are treated in a unified model for a tubular cavity receiver for a dish concentrator; a new design is presented that shows a 40% reduction in receiver losses.

Solar Concentrator Shape Characterisation Using Composite Light-Field Imaging

The shape of an installed solar concentrator (e.g. a heliostat) may differ from its original design due to manufacturing defects, structural/wind loads and thermal expansion. By measuring the shape of a solar concentrator, it is possible to account for the deviation in optical performance from its original design point. A method to measure concentrator shape needs to be fast, accurate, and not involve contact or interference with the reflective surface of the concentrator. State-of-the-art techniques include flux mapping, photogrammetry, and deflectometry using conventional cameras.This paper presents a study to characterise solar concentrator shapes using light-field imaging. Conventional cameras capture the light intensity of a point in a scene at a single point in the sensor, creating a two-dimensional image. A light field camera features multiple micro-lenses placed between the main lens and the sensor, providing many small images from slightly different angles in a single shot. This information is used to reconstruct the position of a light source in space. The advantage of this new technique to the ones mentioned above is that the light field camera is robust and self-contained, which allows easy-to-use application in heliostat fields.In this study, light-field camera measurements were performed with flat mirrors and a curved mirror under laboratory conditions. In order to resolve the surface of the mirror surfaces, several methods to impose contours of the mirror surface have been studied, including dirt, small water droplets, scattering of low-power laser light, and paper-marks. A wide range of camera-to-mirror distances between 43 cm and 5 m have been studied. Greater distances allow the capture of the entire surface, but decrease the precision of depth measurements. In order to obtain high precision measurements while being able to capture the entire surface, a compositing strategy has been developed, combining several light-field image measurements. The overall accuracy of the system was improved further by averaging measurements over several image frames. Subsequently, the reconstructed surface points have been fed to a ray-tracing algorithm realized in Matlab/Python.Results in this study are able to resolve the shape of small concentrators to sub-millimetre precision when taking pictures at a distance of 0.4 m.Copyright