Energetic and exergetic evaluation of conventional and sloped solar chimney power plants

A CFD analysis using ANSYS Fluent software was conducted to study the effects of collector slope on solar chimney's performances. Three solar chimney configurations, named A, B and C, which correspond to a slope of 0°, 2.5° and 5°, respectively, were studied. Both collector Radius and chimney height were fixed to 495m for the three configurations. For the three studied configurations, the pressure ratio was fixed to 0.9 and the solar radiation was varied from 200 W/m2 to 1100 W/m2. The results show that the thermodynamic performances of the solar chimney were enhanced by increasing the inclination angle of the collector roof. In fact, the power extracted from a sloped solar chimney power plant (SSCPP), the energetic and the exergetic efficiencies of the processes increase with increasing the inclination angle and the solar radiation value.