Technical assessment of applying solar thermal storage system to generate electric power

In this paper, retrofitting a fossil fuel boiler with a parabolic trough solar boiler is investigated in Thermoflow software. The solar boiler makes steam by cooling thermal oil in a series of shell and tube heat exchangers. The produced steam is then enters to a 100 MW Rankine cycle power plant. The solar field is fed with a working fluid (therminol) at 295 C and heats it up to about 395 C for generating electric power in the Rankine cycle. It is shown that by using the parabolic solar trough instead of a fossil fuel boiler, we can generate 102000 kW electricity with the efficiency of 17.29 percent

Keywords:

Parabolic trough , solar boiler , storage tank , power generation , Rankine cycle