Modeling and Simulation of a Solar Tower Power Plant with Open Volumetric Air Receiver

Abstract

The start-up of the PS10 power plant in Seville, Spain, in 2007 marked the entrance of solar tower power plants into the commercial state. Questions about the right operational strategy, particularly during unsteady operation states, come to the fore, and therewith the need to carry out transient simulations of entire tower power plants including the heliostat field. Meeting this necessity, the presented simulation approach opens the way to transient full plant simulations of solar tower power plants. A detailed heliostat field model was linked to a dynamic receiver model by coupling both simulation tools. A second coupling was established to a tool hosting a control panel of the heliostat field model. With this simulation approach, a start-up procedure and a tracking stop were simulated delivering different transient behaviors of local absorber temperatures and mass flows.