Heat losses in open receivers

Dear all,
I wondered if you could explain how SAM takes into account the effect of tower's height (wind speed at receiver level to calculate forced convective heat losses on open receivers for solar towers and what approximation uses for the wind speed at receiver level.
Regards
Ricardo

Hi Ricardo,

SAM's power tower model is described in Wagner, M. (M.S. 2008). Simulation and Predictive Performance Modeling of Utility-Scale Central Receiver System Power Plants. University of Wisconsin-Madison. ( ZIP 32.3 MB ). You can find a link to that publications and others on the CSP Publications page: sam.nrel.gov/concentrating-solar-power/csp-publications.html

Chapter 3.2 described the receiver thermal model and equations.

The source code for some of these calculations is here, where you can see the weather file wind speed is assumed to be at 10 m and then adjusted for the tower height:

github.com/NREL/ssc/blob/cea847f43440270f0bebc73112eb11e1ec2c9478/tcs/csp_solver_mspt_receiver.cpp#L1037

Best regards,
Paul.