Opto-Thermal Design and Analysis of a 1 MW Panel Solar Central Receiver for Small-Scale Applications

This paper discusses the design and analysis of a panel receiver for the solar tower, with the objective of designing a suitable receiver for a small-scale solar tower plant. The plant is intended to have a high temperature (> 450 °C) thermal power output of 1 MW to be used for charging thermal storage for various applications like backup for a thermal power plant or metallurgical applications like heat treatment. The heat flux distribution on the panel receiver has been obtained using a radial staggered heliostat field with centre of the receiver as aiming point. This design and analysis of the panel receiver has been done for Bikaner, India on spring equinox, solar noon. The thermal efficiency of this designed receiver comes out to be 79.5%.