Electrical production of a small size Concentrated Solar Power plant with compound parabolic collectors

The use of the solar energy for electricity or useful heat generation has been extensively investigated as an alternative to fossil fired energy conversion. Particularly in the last decade, many studies have been carried out on Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) which was developed worldwide with Spain acting as the leading country in this field. Concentrating solar energy requires complex mirror systems which continuously move to track the sun. In comparison with flat mirrors, Parabolic Through Collectors (PTCs) have allowed to reduce costs, but they still remain quite an expensive solution. Instead, compound parabolic collectors (CPCs) are able to collect a higher fraction of both the direct and the diffuse radiation, although they have a lower efficiency at high temperature. Moreover, at least within certain limits, they do not require a tracking system. Their employment is therefore suited for the collection of medium temperature heat (up to 200 °C) and is useful for the reduction of the installation cost of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) heating/cooling and energy generation systems. Small size plants (10–50 kW) were studied in this paper since they are more likely to be realized due to their smaller initial investment cost and to the capability of being installed on the roof of existing buildings. While the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) solution is well established to be the optimal for small size, distributed generation plants, the technology of the expansion device is still to be defined for the investigated installed power range. Accordingly to previous studies, an expansion device based on the Wankel mechanism was employed.

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