Techno-Economic Optimization of Falling Particle Receivers for Solar Tower Plants

Solid particle receivers are proposed as the next generation of receivers for solar tower CSP plants as they are able to overcome the temperature limits of solar salts. However, maximizing their performance requires robust design optimization tools. Therefore, this study proposes a methodology for the techno-economic optimization of the design of falling particle receivers for polar-field solar tower CSP plants. Given a specific solar field and location, the optimized design is derived using a parametric approach based on Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) minimization, varying the height and the width of the receiver, as well as, the size of thermal energy storage. Methodology is applied to a 100 MWth solar tower plant in Daggett, California, and the results show that the receiver sized using the proposed approach can achieve LCOE of 80.1 $/MWh that is by 2.2 % lower compared to the LCOE of the receiver sized only through on-design performance maximization.