Thermal Performance of Solar Tower Using Air as Heat Transfer Fluid under MENA Region Climate

Among all Concentrating Solar Power technologies available, the solar tower technology is one of the most interesting technology that attract researchers. This paper investigates the thermal performance of the central receiver using a numerical simulation, where the proposed solar power plant is based on the Brayton cycle with volumetric air receiver. The transient system simulation software (TRNSYS 16) was used to evaluate the performance of the solar tower plant. The system was carried out on different climatic conditions of the MENA region such as Bechar, Adrar (Algeria), Cairo (Egypt), Abu Dhabi (UAE), Tripoli (Libya), Tunisia (Tunis) and Baghdad (Iraq). The obtained results show that, for a volumetric receiver with aperture equal to 25m2, the temperature of the working fluid can reach 1080 °C during the plant operation which is considered high. In addition, the efficiency of the thermal receiver has been found around 88% due to the high operating temperature. The results of the analysis indicate that the higher solar intensity higher up the overall thermal efficiency.