DESIGN AND CFD ANALYSIS OF CONICAL CAVITY RECEIVER FOR SCHEFFLER DISH

In the present paper, a conical cavity receiver is designed and analyzed for a 16 m2 Scheffler dish concentrator. The optimum aperture diameter of conical cavity receiver is estimated using ray-tracing SolTrace software. The optimum aperture diameter of the conical cavity receiver for 16 m2 Scheffler dish was found to be 0.4 m. Also, thermal and fluid flow analysis is performed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, Ansys Fluent. The different parameters such as receiver temperature, heat losses, pressure drop, Nusselt number, and pumping power are analyzed. The maximum thermal efficiency was found to be 64% at receiver surface temperature 85°C and ambient temperature 25°C. Also, maximum pumping power required to circulate a flow through the receiver is found to be 1.03 W for 0.04 kg/s flow rate. © 2023 by Begell House, Inc.