This paper describes gas turbine/solar trough hybrid designs that achieve a solar contribution greater than 50% and increase the solar-to-electric efficiency while reducing gas heat rate. Two conceptual designs are explored: (1) integrating gas turbines with conventional oil heat-transfer-fluid...

Renewable energy sources and especially solar energy may be the answer to the increasing demand for energy, leading to the reduction of fossil fuel consumption and its associated negative environmental impact. An attractive solution to this problem could be the combination of renewable and...

In the paper description and working principles of the parabolic trough power plants, solar tower power plants, parabolic dish power plants and power plants with Fresnel reflectors in the world and their potential use in Serbia are given. In addition, the examples and technical characteristics...

Energetic and exergetic analysis has been carried out for the components of the solar thermal power plant system (parabolic trough collector/receiver and Rankine heat engine). The energetic and exergetic losses as well as efficiencies for typical parabolic trough concentrating solar thermal...

In this paper, Monte Carlo ray-tracing and computational fluid dynamics are used to numerically investigate the minimum entropy generation due to heat transfer and fluid friction in a parabolic trough receiver. The analysis was carried out for rim angles in the range 40°–120°, concentration...

Parabolic trough solar collector is the most proven industry-scale solar generation technology today available. The thermal performance of such devices is of major interest for optimising the solar field output and increase the efficiency of power plants. In this paper, a detailed numerical heat...

The contribution of solar thermal power to improve the performance of gas-fired combined cycles in very hot and dry environmental conditions is analyzed in this work, in order to assess the potential of this technique, and to feature Direct Steam Generation (DSG) as a well suited candidate for...

A tubular cavity-receiver that uses air as the heat transfer fluid is evaluated numerically using a validated heat transfer model. The receiver is designed for use on a large-span (9m net concentrator aperture width) solar parabolic trough concentrator. Through the combination of a parabolic...