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Investigation on the Exergy Performance of a Central Receiver Power Plant

Ramadan Ali Abdiwe and Markus Haider

The present paper describes the exergy analysis of a Central Receiver System (CRS) power plant. The plant consists of a thousand heliostats with an area of 130 m² each, an external receiver with an area of 59 m² and a height of 70 m, a steam generator, two steam turbines with a reheater in between, two feed water heaters and a condenser. EBSILON®Professional software was used to obtain the exergy efficiency and the irreversibility in each component of the power plant to pinpoint the causes and locations of the thermodynamic imperfection. The model analyzed and tested the effect of two design parameters including the Direct Normal Irradiation (DNI) and the outlet temperature of the Heat Transfer Fluid (HTF) on the exergy performance. The obtained results show at a constant DNI the maximum exergy loss occurs at the Receiver followed by the heliostat field and the power cycle has the lowest exergy loss. The increase of the DNI affects negatively the exergy efficiency of the overall system. The variation of the outlet temperature of the HTF has an impact of the exergy performance of the receiver subsystem as well as the overall system; the increase of the outlet temperature from 450˚C to 600˚C leads to an increase the exergy efficiency of the receiver to about 5% and an increase the exergy efficiency of the overall system to about 1%.