OPTIMIZATION OF A SMALL SCALE CONCENTRATED SOLAR POWER PLANT USING RANKINE CYCLE

A system for the exploitation of the available energy of the sun is proposed in this paper. The system involves a collector, a heat reservoir, a vapor generator, a set of direction control valves and a turbine. These components can be combined to form four closed different cycles in order to generate electricity or store heat according to the outdoor environment. An optimization method is proposed to optimize the energy collected at the shaft of the turbine for a given input sun power. The method establishes a functional relationship between the optimal mass flow rate through the collector, the sun input power and the optimal collected power at the shaft of the turbine. A similar functional relationship is established between the optimal temperature of the working fluid and the sun input power. The collected optimal energy is computed as a function of the sun input power for different temperatures of the vapor generator. The effect of the heat transfer coefficient and coefficient of radiation of StefanBoltzmann and the temperature of the vapor generator on the output optimal energy are investigated.