Performance optimization of high-temperature supercritical carbon dioxide concentrating solar power plant with an improved solar receiver

Improving the outlet temperature of working fluid in solar receiver is an important measure to improve the thermal efficiency of power cycle used in concentrating solar power system. However, the thermal efficiency of solar receiver is sharply reduced with temperature increasing, which inevitably causes the power generation efficiency of system decreasing. In the present study, an improved structure of solar receiver is proposed and an integral computational model is established to investigate the performance of concentrating solar power system with supercritical CO₂ power cycle. The comparison results between the improved and the conventional solar receivers show that the improved solar receiver can significantly reduce heat loss and improve the thermal efficiency from 80.34% to 89.61% at the working temperature of 720 °C. The improved solar receiver is integrated into the concentrating solar power system to analyze the effects of working parameters on system performance. And the system performance is optimized by orthogonal experiment and genetic algorithms. The results show the split ratio has the most significant effect on power generation efficiency, followed by minimum pressure, molten salt outlet temperature and reheat pressure. Compared to the original system, the power generation efficiency of the concentrating solar power system can be improved from 29.20% to 34.23% by the present work.