Publications

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Charles Andraka from Sandia Labs was given the Hoyt Clarke Hottel Award for his lifelong work in the concentrating solar power industry.

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Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) dish systems use a parabolic dish to concentrate sunlight, providing heat for a thermodynamic cycle to generate shaft power and ultimately, electricity. Currently, leading contenders use a Stirling cycle engine with a heat absorber surface at about 800°C. The concentrated light passes through an aperture, which controls the thermal losses of the receiver system. Similar systems may use the concentrated light to heat a thermochemical process. The concentrator system, typically steel and glass, provides a source of fuel over the service life of the system, but this source of fuel manifests as a capital cost up front. Therefore, it is imperative that the cost of the reflector assembly is minimized. However, dish systems typically concentrate light to a peak of as much as 13,000 suns, with an average geometric concentration ratio of over 3000 suns. Several recent dish-Stirling systems have incorporated reflector facets with a normally-distributed surface slope error (local distributed waviness) of 0.8 mrad RMS (1-sigma error). As systems move toward commercialization, the cost of these highly accurate facets must be assessed. However, when considering lower-cost options, any decrease in the performance of the facets must be considered in the evaluation of such facets. In this paper, I investigate the impact of randomly-distributed slope errors on the performance, and therefore the value, of a typical dish-Stirling system. There are many potential sources of error in a concentrating system. When considering facet options, the surface waviness, characterized as a normally-distributed slope error, has the greatest impact on the aperture size and therefore the thermal losses. I develop an optical model and a thermal model for the performance of a baseline system. I then analyze the impact on system performance for a range of mirror quality, and evaluate the impact of such performance changes on the economic value of the system. This approach can be used to guide the evaluation of low-cost facets that differ in performance and cost. The methodology and results are applicable to other point- and line-focus thermal systems including dish-Brayton, dish-Thermochemical, tower systems, and troughs. Copyright © 2008 by ASME.

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The development of liquid metal heat-pipes for use in solar powered Stirling engines has led to an in-depth analysis of heat-pipe wick properties. To model the flow of liquid sodium through the wick its two-phase permeability measurement is of interest. The permeability will be measured by constructing a test cell made up of a wick sample sintered to a manifold. Measuring the volumetric flow rate through the wick will allow for a determination of the wick's permeability as a function of pressure. Currently, simple estimates of permeability as a function of vapor fraction of a porous media are being used as a model to calculate the two-phase permeability. The above mentioned experiment will be used to test the existing formulas validity. The plan is to make use of a known procedure for testing permeability and apply those techniques to a felt-metal wick. The results will be used to verify and/or modify the two-phase permeability estimates. With the increasing desire to replace directly illuminated engines with the much more efficient heat-pipe apparatus it is inherently clear that the usefulness of known wick properties will make wick permeability design a simpler process.