A moist air condensing device for sustainable energy production and water generation

A solar chimney power plant (SCPP) is not only a solar thermal application system to achieve output power, but also a device extracting freshwater from the humid air. In this article, we proposed a SCPP with collector being replaced by black tubes around the chimney to warm water and air. The overall performance of SCPP was analyzed by using a one-dimensional compressible fluid transfer model to calculate the system characteristic parameters, such as chimney inlet air velocity, the condensation level, amount of condensed water, output power, and efficiency. It was found that increasing the chimney inlet air temperature is an efficient way to increase chimney inlet air velocity and wind turbine output power. The operating conditions, such as air temperature and air relative humidity, have significant influence on the condensation level. For water generation, chimney height is the most decisive factor, the mass flow rate of condensed water decreases with increasing wind turbine pressure drop. To achieve the optimum peak output power by wind turbine, we should set the pressure drop factor as about 0.7. In addition, increasing chimney height is also an efficient way to improve the SCPP efficiency. Under ideal conditions, the system total efficiency of a SCPP with a height of 3000 m can be up to nearly 7%.