• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.35 no.12
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• pp.1383-1389
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• 2011

The current study focuses on the consistent analysis of heat transfer in multichannel volumetric solar receivers used for concentrating solar power. Changes in the properties of the absorbing material and channel dimensions are considered in an optical model based on the Monte Carlo ray-tracing method and in a one-dimensional heat transfer model that includes conduction, convection, and radiation. The optical model results show that most of the solar radiation energy is absorbed within a very small channel length of around 15 mm because of the large length-to-radius ratio. Classification of radiation losses reveals that at low absorptivity, increased reflection losses cause reduction of the receiver efficiency, notwithstanding the decrease in the emission loss. As the average temperature increases because of the large channel radius or small mass flow rate, both emission and reflection losses increase but the effect of emission losses prevails.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.41-47
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• 2011

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.