ANNUAL SIMULATIONS WITH THE EBSILON PROFESSIONAL TIME SERIES CALCULATION MODULE

Abstract

Although not used by most of the solar thermal power plants today, the ability to store thermal energy is considered as their main technological advantage in the future. During the planning phase of solar plants with storage powerful and flexible simulation tools are required. The cycle simulation tool EBSILONProfessional has been extended by a solar thermal component library in release 9.0 published in spring 2010. Besides steady-state calculations of the thermodynamic cycle, the tool offers a time series calculation module that allows simulation of solar thermal power plants with ntegrated thermal storage. The paper presents two examples for such calculation, the one being a molten salt parabolic trough plant and the second a conventional, oil based parabolic trough system. Both units are equipped with a two-tank molten salt storage.