Study of Effect of Various Process Parameters on the Performance of Chimney Operated Solar Power Plant

Conventional energy sources like coal and oil used for power generation causes various environmental problems like creating pollution and creating ecological imbalance. These sources are also depleting due to lesser use of alternative resources. Chimney operated solar power plant is one of the best alternative which can be used to produce power in large capacity with the use of solar energy. It consist of very few number of parts like turbine, collector and chimney. This paper consist of study of effect of different process parameters on the performance this chimney operated solar power plant. A small prototype model of this power plant is fabricated which has collector of 1.8 m diameter and chimney of maximum height of 2.0 m. D.C motor with small generator and blades is used as turbine to get power output. The various process parameters like temperature, pressure, velocity are used to determine power output and efficiency of power plant. Numerous mathematical correlations were used to correlate these input and output parameters. The effect of chimney height on these parameters was studied. It was determined that temperature and velocity are the important parameters which improves the performance of solar chimney power plant along with chimney height and collector diameter.