The effect of chimney entrance slope and constricted section on the performance of solar chimney power plants: A CFD approach

Gaziantep University, 27600 Gaziantep, Turkey

^* Corresponding author: mahmutkaplan@gantep.edu.tr

Abstract

The depletion of hydrocarbon resources and climate change are major global issues which need to be solved urgently. Sun is a clean, inexhaustible, sustainable energy source which has the capacity to meet the future energy demands. Solar chimney power plants (SCPPs) with a simple design are competent to generate large-scale electricity. Primary components of SCPP are the chimney, turbine, and collector. In this work, impact of the chimney entrance slope and narrowed section on performance of SCPP is scrutinized. A computational fluid dynamics model (CFD) is constructed based on Manzanares plant with a chimney height (H) of 194.6 m via ANSYS FLUENT. The novel configurations are generated by changing the chimney inlet slope, θ (45°-85°) and radius of the constricted section with a fixed height (H/28). The findings demonstrate that a decrease in the slope with the constricted section improves the velocity, power and turbine pressure drop. The highest velocity of 17.9 m/s is gained for the configuration with θ = 85° compared to that of 14.3 m/s obtained for the base (θ = 45°) at 1000 W/m². This configuration enhances power output to 60.4 kW with a rise of 31.3% in comparison to the base case at 1000 W/m².