Experimental investigation of a solar chimney power plant and its numerical verification of thermo-physical flow parameters for performance enhancement

Summary

A small solar chimney power plant prototype was built and tested outdoors, and ANSYS Fluent simulations agreed with the measurements while revealing reverse flow and vortices in the original geometry. Further simulations widened the chimney and varied the collector inlet height, finding an optimum near 7 cm that raises output to about 2.9 W, and correlations were derived to help size small plants.

Description written by Solar Tower. The original abstract is available from the publisher via the link below.