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Concentrating Solar Thermal Power
Published in D. Yogi Goswami, Frank Kreith, Energy Conversion, 2017
Manuel Romero, Jose Gonzalez-Aguilar, Eduardo Zarza
Production of superheated steam in the solar receiver has been demonstrated in several plants, such as Solar One, Eurelios, and CESA-1, but operating experience showed critical problems related to the control of zones with dissimilar heat transfer coefficients like boilers and superheaters (Grasse et al., 1991). Better results regarding absorber panel lifetime and controllability have been reported for saturated steam receivers. In particular, the Solar Thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery pilot plant, which proved to be highly reliable for oil extraction using direct injection of steam, was successfully operated in Kern County, California, for 345 days in 1983 (Blake et al., 1985). The good performance of saturated steam receivers was also qualified at the 2 MW Weizmann receiver that produced steam at 15 bar for 500 h in 1989 (Epstein et al., 1991). Even though technical risks are reduced by saturated steam receivers, the outlet temperatures are significantly lower than those of superheated steam, making applications where heat storage is replaced by fossil fuel backup necessary.
Exergy performance assessment of direct steam generation with glasshouse enclosed parabolic trough installation used for solar thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) application
Published in Australian Journal of Mechanical Engineering, 2023
Ramesh Vakkethummel Kundalamcheery, V Chintala
Industries all over the world are striving to find economically viable opportunities for harnessing renewable energy for their operations. In heavy oil petroleum upstream business, solar thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) technology is a latest development for harnessing solar energy where in, solar energy is utilised for generating steam for injecting into reservoir by Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies. Various methods of EOR operations including solar thermal EOR are previously studied by the Authors (Ramesh, Chintala, and Suresh 2019). Further, an experimental study was carried out on a live Glasshouse enclosed Parabolic Trough Collector (GPTC) installation located at Sultanate of Oman, wherein the parabolic trough collectors (PTC) and receiver tube assemblies are were enclosed within a glasshouse of high solar transmittance to overcome wind load to ease the cleaning operation (Ramesh, Chintala, and Kumar 2020). This installation is first of its kind in the world due to several reasons. Generally, PTCs are utilised to transmit thermal energy to heat transfer fluids such as thermal oil or heat oils. However, in the plant where the experimental investigation was performed, in addition to the glasshouse enclosure design, PTCs were utilised for direct steam generation, which is a novelty of the study. Since glasshouse structure can efficiently handle dusty and windy environment, which prevails in most of the heavy oil fields worldwide, Glasshouse enclosed Parabolic Trough Collector (GPTC) technology is ideal for solar thermal EOR. Though, enclosed trough technology is relatively a new development in solar thermal EOR business, it comes with additional advantage of low capital cost for support structure of PTC’s and its installation as the wind load inside the glass house can be completely eliminated with glasshouse. Moreover, the dust removal operation is relatively easier for enclosed trough technology (Ramesh, Chintala, and Suresh 2019) as cleaning of the glasshouse can be properly automated. Although GPTC technology project is commercially deployed at the Authors work place i.e., Sultanate of Oman, there has not been any work published on its exergy performance analysis so far. The energy performance aspects of the same installation have been published by Authors (Ramesh and Chintala 2020). Likewise, thermal performance evaluation of solar cooker with latent and sensible heat storage unit for evening cooking was performed by Yadav et al (Yadav et al. 2017) and performance analyses of coal-fired thermal power plant using parabolic solar collectors for feed water heaters was conducted by Getee et al (Getee 2020)