Numerical evaluation of an innovative cup layout for open volumetric solar air receivers

This paper proposes an innovative volumetric solar absorber design to be used in high-temperature air receivers of solar power tower plants. The innovative absorber a so-called CPC-stacked-plate configuration applies the well-known principle of a compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) for the first time in a volumetric solar receiver heating air to high temperatures. The proposed absorber configuration is analyzed numerically applying first the open-source ray-tracing software Tonatiuh in order to obtain the solar flux distribution on the absorber’s surfaces. Next a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) analysis of a representative single channel of the innovative receiver is performed using the commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent. The solution of the conjugate heat transfer problem shows that the behavior of the new absorber concept is promising however further optimization of the geometry will be necessary in order to exceed the performance of the classical absorber designs.