Simulation and experimental study on a spiral solid particle solar receiver

A solid-particle solar receiver was proposed to convert concentrated solar beams into heat for high-temperature thermal storage in a two-stage dish system. Spherical Xe-arc lamps were used to simulate a solar light source. The performances of this receiver under a Xe-arc lamp array system were experimentally and numerically investigated. For a single pass, the temperature increase exceeded 350 °C, and the optical efficiency and thermal efficiency were ∼84% and 60%, respectively, when the average flux on the aperture was ∼19.3 kW/m2. A Monte-Carlo ray-tracing method was used to simulate concentrating beams, which was integrated with a thermal conversion model. The coupled model was validated under low radiation flux conditions and then used to predict the solid-particle receiver performance under high radiation flux conditions. The simulation results indicate that the final temperature of the single-pass particles would increase to over 1100 °C under an average flux of 150 kW/m2. In addition, the efficiency of the receiver could be enhanced by reducing the radiative emission.