Dynamic Modeling of the Operation of a High Temperature Pressurized Air Production System

To install a tower solar power plant, the receiver is a key part for storing heat. There are two categories of receivers: surface receivers and volumetric receivers. To produce pressurized air at very high temperatures, the volumetric receiver is indicated. Thus, it allows the air to be heated up to 1100？C [1] allowing good efficiency to be achieved. We present here the dynamic modeling of a volumetric solar receiver with pressurized air. The absorber used is designed with ceramic material (terracotta) and a parallelepiped shape called a honeycomb absorber. In our case, the circular cells have a diameter of 3mm and are separated from each other by a distance of 3 mm. The symmetrical character allows us to reduce the calculation domains to an elementary cell representative of their structure. We use the finite element method of the Comsol 5.3a calculation code for the numerical resolution. Our results thus show that with a pressure of 10 bars and an air inlet temperature of 398K？C for a mass air flow rate of 0.3 kg/s, we obtain an air outlet temperature of around 1000 K, which is sufficient to supply a combustion chamber and drive an alternator.