Analysis of the Influence Factors on the Overheat of Molten Salt Receiver in Solar Tower Power Plants

The use of molten salt as heat transfer fluid in solar tower power plant(STPP) helps to improve the efficiency and boost the plant's performance as a whole.However,for the receiver work temperature is much higher,overheat easily happens which causes local excessive temperature as a consequence.This will lead to receiver structure damage as well as molten salt decomposition.In order to find out the main factors influencing overheat,this paper used a computational fluid dynamics(CFD) software to analyze temperature sensibilities of the receiver and molten salt fluid.Numerical experiments were done,and data was analyzed.Results show that four parameters affect local maximum temperature:the maximum heat flux density qmax,the thickness of the tube δ,the fluid velocity u,and the fluid average temperature tf.Their temperature influence trends are also given in the paper with explanations.At last,methods of utilizing these parameters to give a receiver overheat prediction were proposed.