DAY 2 Plenary Session - Concentrating Solar Thermal - Receivers.
Stream – Concentrating Solar Power - Long, S. paper.This paper reports on a systematic experimental and numerical study that investigates the interaction between four isothermal jets within a cylindrical chamber under conditions relevant to a Hybrid Solar Receiver Combustor (HSRC). The HSRC features a cavity that is operable as a combustion chamber, or as a cavity receiver with an aperture to admit the concentrated solar radiation, multiple burners to direct fuel and air into the chamber and tubular heat exchangers to transfer the heat to the heat transfer fluid. The HSRC geometry is simplified here to the cylindrical cavity with four jets, representing the burners, which are configured in an annular arrangement and aligned at an angle to the axis with a swirling component. The aperture to the cavity is closed while the four jets interact with each other and with the cavity wall. The jet inclination angle (αj) was fixed at 25°, while the jet azimuthal angle (θj) was varied from 5° to 15°. The inlet Reynolds number for each injected jet and the number of jets were fixed at ReD = 10500 and 4, respectively. Measurements obtained with Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) were used together with numerical modelling employing Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) methods to characterise the large-scale flow field within the HSRC device. The results reveal a significant dependence of the mean flow-field on the jet azimuthal angle (θj) and have implications on the heat transfer within the HSRC.S.Long, T.C.W. Lau, A. Chinnici, Z.F. Tian, B.B. Dally and G.J. Natha
