An experimental study of ammonia receiver geometries for dish concentrators

Rebecca Dunn*, Keith Lovegrove, Greg Burgess, John Pye

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    14 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This paper presents experimental evaluation of ammonia receiver geometries with a 9 m 2 dish concentrator. The experiments involved varying the geometric arrangement of reactor tubes in a thermochemical reactor built from a series of tubes arranged in a conical shape inside a cavity receiver. Differences in conical arrangement were found to affect the efficiency of energy conversion. The solar-to-chemical efficiency gain obtained by varying the receiver geometry was up to 7 absolute. From this, it is apparent that geometric optimizations are worth pursuing since the resulting efficiency gains are achieved with no increase in costs of manufacture for receivers. The experimental results and methodology can be used when developing receivers for larger dish concentrators, such as the second generation 500 m 2 dish concentrator developed at the Australian National University.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number041007
    JournalJournal of Solar Energy Engineering, Transactions of the ASME
    Volume134
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2012

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