Investigation of Optical Efficiency of the Concentrated Solar Power System Located on the Inclined Hillside Areas

Renewable energy in the industrial sector is a key step in achieving low-carbon production systems. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technologies can be used to generate electricity by converting sunlight energy to power a turbine. Solar Power Tower (SPT) has become more developed and well-liked in recent years on a commercial scale, despite the fact that parabolic trough is still the most well-known and widely used CSP technology. In this study, the inclined barren surfaces of hillside areas are taken as solar fields which are named as Hillside Concentrated Solar Powerplant (HCSP) system. For this, three different barren hilly areas located at United States have been selected where the solar irradiation is moderately higher. A simple inclined plane V-shape layout with 5100 heliostats is simulated for optical efficiency in each of the locations for four days of a year and three times of a day. These simulation results show that the inclined rectangular array type layout provides greater optical efficiency at any of the three locations investigated than the optical efficiencies of the traditional horizontal plane functional layouts.

SSRN 14th International Conference on Mechanical Engineering (ICME 2023)