DESIGN STUDY OF VORTICAL SOLAR CHIMNEY POWER PLANT

This work is concerned with improving a solar chimney power plant that was studied before this development involve, new chimney tower for the power plant which generates confined vortex of air system. The vortex will cause air pressure to decrease inside the chimney tower and leads to an increase in the amount of airflow from the solar collector and the vanes of the generation vortex system. The above effect results an increase in the wind turbine velocity and the output power of the plant. In this work the new development enables the plant to continue performing for 24hr a day by using the water heat storage system in the solar collector. Two computer programs were used to predict the performance of vortical solar chimney power plants. The first one is the ANSYS 5.4 program which is

based on the non-linear numerical solution, using Finite Element Method, for the system of governing partial differential equations (continuity, momentum and the energy equations) of conventional heat transfer field through the plant collector and the second part in the chimney tower passages. The second is MATLAB 6.1 computer program analysis based on solving the simultaneous equations for the generation vortex region in the first part from the chimney tower, because it is very difficult to use the ANSYS 5.4 program at this region. This work proved the ability of the vortical solar chimney power plant to generate more output power and continue it’s performance for 24hr a day, by comparing the vortical power plant results with the results obtained from the Finite Element Method applied to Manzanares power plant and with results of experimental tests of the Manzanares plant under the same weather conditions, would be seen that the output power of vortical plant is increased by 1.7 times [from 50kW to 85.818kW] the output of the Manzanares power plant.  In this study another four power plants considered, which have the same dimensions and operating under the same weather conditions on the 21st

January and on the 21st July 2002. The above four power plants showed that the advantages of the generation vortex system in the power plant is to increase the output power and the water heat storage system in the power plant hence increases the plant operation time for 24hr a day by using the ANSYS 5.4 & MATLAB 6.1 programs in the solution. From above, it is possible to build a medium vortical solar chimney power plant operating in the winter and summer under Iraqi weather conditions.