A review on Solar Thermal System Design, Integration, and Techno-economic Modeling for Industrial Heating and Cooling Processes

The utilization of solar thermal energy has been ranging from simple fire starting using a pocket mirror to the solar architecture used in various ways. Solar thermal applications are indispensable and crucial technologies with increasing attention in renewable energy research for their high energy conversion efficiency and energy storage density. Solar collectors can absorb nearly the entire solar spectrum; around 50% of the sun's energy is invisible to the human eye in the infrared spectrum, as heat. Thermal energy storage (TES) can store on average around 10, 000 kW for about 6 hours. Financially, solar thermal energy conversion systems in many locations have reached gridparity (EUR 0.02 0.05/kWh for low-temperature and EUR 0.05 0.15/kWh for medium-temperature applications). Thus, solar heating and cooling (SHC) systems are identified as typical application areas for the huge technical potential of solar thermal integration (up to 5.6EJ in 2050) available within industries that are predominantly being met with environmentally unfriendly and less available fossil fuels. The scope of this review is, therefore, to demonstrate the state-of-the-art for basic energy generation and supply concepts of solar thermal systems for industrial application. The paper presents the basic solar thermal system design, configuration, operation, and possible integration concepts with an existing conventional system. It also describes the techno-economic mathematical models and analysis techniques for solar thermal system key performance indicators. Accordingly, this paper can be used as a brief extract and guide to systematically approach industrial solar system development projects using best practices adopted to explore the contributions of the researchers in the literature.