Numerical and Experimental Study of the Aerothermal Characteristics in Solar Chimney Power Plant with Hyperbolic Chimney Shape

Solar chimney power plant (SCPP) is an attractive way to produce electricity in the high solar radiations zones. It consists of three main components: collector, chimney and turbine. The chimney is considered as the most expensive part of the SCPP. This is due to the requirement of important height to achieve suitable performance. In this paper, a new chimney design of hyperbolic shape is proposed. The design is optimized by analyzing the impact of the divergence radius of the chimney on the SCPP performance using a 2D computational fluid dynamics code. For this end, the ratio of the hyperbolic chimney radius over the chimney height was varied from 0 to 0.3. Computational results were validated against test data from a developed experimental prototype. The comparison of the proposed designs with a conventional solar chimney power plant shows a significant performance improvement. In fact, the increase in the divergence chimney radius has led to more advanced power output. Specially, a rise of 295% of the total system efficiency is found when the divergence radius is set to 15m.