Experimental Study of The Steam Enthalpy Improvement with Concentrated Solar Power Utilization

Abstract

The solar energy reaching the Earth can be used in many applications, and one of the most important of these applications is the generation of steam using solar thermal energy. One of the most important technologies used to invest solar radiation to generate steam is concentric solar thermal (CST) technology, this technology includes concentrating solar radiation by specific reflectors such as Parabolic Dish. Four steam power systems have been fabricated and tested during the period from 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm. Therefore, this experimental study was carried out at  Amiriyah Fallujah - Iraq (latitude 33.16°N, longitude 43.87°E). This study aims to improve the thermal properties of steam generated from solar thermal energy systems, as a way to compare the performance of four solar power systems that generate steam power. When testing a single steam generator in case 1, several masses of water were evaporated from 50 g to 300 g. It was found that the ability of the evaporation tank is limited in its ability to evaporate water masses up to 200 g, where the produced steam is superheated, while masses of water above 200 g tend to start to Wet steam condition and to treat this condition a secondary solar collector was added. The steam generator acts as a superheater in case 3. As for case 4, it involved the use of two collectors, one of which works as the main steam generator and the other a secondary steam generator, where two masses of steam were mixed, one of which had a high enthalpy and the other a low enthalpy, and the result was steam with good thermal specifications on an appropriate degree of superheating. While case 2 was tested to study the specifications of steam when evaporating 300 grams of water, where the state of the generated steam is wet steam, case 3 and case 4 were manufactured based on the results of the case 2 test to treat the vapor state and turn it into superheated steam and compare its enthalpy to the enthalpy of steam in the case 2. Based on the enthalpy of the vapor produced and the efficiency of the system, as well as the closeness of the efficiency of its evaporator to the efficiency of the evaporator in the reference case (case 2), it was found that case 4 has a better performance than case 3.