Abstract
The volumetric solar receiver is a key element of solar power plants using air. The solar flux distribution inside the receiver should be a priori known for its heat transfer analysis. Previous works have not considered characteristics of the solar flux although they change with radiative properties of receiver materials and receiver geometries. A numerical method, which is based on the Monte Carlo ray-tracing method, was developed in the current work. The solar flux distributions inside multi-channeled volumetric solar receivers were calculated when light is concentrated at the KIER solar furnace. It turned out that 99 percentage of the concentrated solar energy is absorbed within 15mm channel length for the channel radius smaller than 1.5mm. If the concentrated light is assumed to be diffuse, the absorbed solar energy at the channel entrance region is over predicted while the light penetrates more deeply into the channel. Once the presented results are imported into the heat transfer analysis, one could examine effects of material property and geometry of the receiver on air temperature profiles.
