Evaluation of the optical and thermal performance of a 100 kWe micro-solar tower power plant in Sub-Saharan Africa: a case of Chad

This work aims to determine the optical and thermal performance of a 100 kWe micro tower power plant equipped with a CPC. The sizing of the heliostat field and the 3D parabolic compound concentrator (CPC) was carried out. A Matlab code has been developed to configure the heliostats in the field. The ray tracing tool (Soltrace) combined with a SolarPilot optimization tool are used to evaluate the optical and thermal performance of the solar field. The design results gave a total heliostat area of 922 m2. Heliostats of 2 m2 of the unit area were chosen, which gave some 461 heliostats. Acceptance and inclination angles of 26° and 52°, respectively, were found. An optimum height of 28 m was obtained. A total efficiency of 62.23% and an incident flux on a flat receiver of 884.02 kW/m2 were obtained.