Efficiency improvement on solar chimney energy system using stationary Obstacles

Due to recent veritable concerns over deployment of fossil energy sources, investigations on re-newable energy have drastically increased over the last decades. Since, solar energy is considered among the fast growing renewable energy sources, researchers and industry decision makers are in constant effort to improve energy conversion efficiency for these systems. In this study, a solar chimney energy system has been simulated in two cases. The main target of this study is to en-hance the efficiency of a solar chimney power plant by making some changes in the internal geo-metry of the SCPP. In this regard, Computational fluid dynamic approach has been utilized to si-mulate the flow field of a pilot case and the results showed suitable agreement with the experimen-tal data. Flow guiding obstacles with rectangular and triangular profiles have been used to im-prove the heat transfer within the system and increase the velocity of airflow through the turbine. The results indicate that rectangular and triangular obstacle will lead to efficiency improvements equal to 49.2 and 72.8% respectively.

Keywords:

Computational fluid dynamics , solar chimney , free convection heat transfer