Development and application of a multidomaindynamic model for direct steamgeneration solar power plant
Abstract: Nowadays, one of the solutions considered in order to face the issue of global warming and to move towards a carbon neutral society relies on the use of solar energy as a renewable and bountiful primary source. And, if photovoltaic technologies account for a large part in the solar energy market, recent years have witnessed the growth of non-concentrated and concentrated solar thermal technologies. Among them, concentrated solar power technology (CSP) which uses the optical concentration of direct solar irradiation to generate high pressure and high temperature steam in the absorber tubes of the plant, has become a promising approach reaching 4.9 GWe of installed capacity by the end of 2015 [1]. However, one of the main challenges faced by CSP technology concerns the variability of solar energy related for example to sunrise, sunset, passing clouds… In addition to that, when it comes to direct steam generation, the presence of a two-phase flow regime inside the absorber tubes leads to a strong dynamic behavior of the steam generation. It is consequently necessary to be able to simulate this dynamic behavior in order to better handle the design and operation of CSP plants. Such simulation tools can then be used for the implementation and the test of reliable control systems aimed at maintaining desired operating conditions in spite of changes in solar irradiation. In this context, the National Institute for Solar Energy (INES), part of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) wishes to upgrade their dynamic simulation tool that would enable its teams to reproduce the behavior of a prototype based on the Fresnel solar field technology including direct steam generation which was built and commissioned at Cadarache, Aix-en-Provence. This Master thesis work takes place within this framework and aims at developing a multi-domain dynamic model of the aforementioned prototype. To do so, three models respectively in the thermalhydraulic, the optical and the control-command domains are built and combined using a co-simulation approach relying on an in-house simulation platform called PEGASE. More specifically the development of the following models has been addressed: a thermal-hydraulic model of the two-phase flow circulating inside the vaporizer field of the prototype and realized with the thermal-hydraulic code CATHARE [2] (Advanced ThermalHydraulic Code for Water Reactor Accidents) applied to solar thermal biphasic issues, an optical model of the receiver programmed using the Modelica language and the Dymola (Dynamic Modelling Laboratory) simulation software, control-command models (PID controller, control architecture…) adapted and built upon blocks taken from a modelling library included in the PEGASE platform. Each model was first developed and tested on a standalone basis. These models were then coupled using the PEGASE co-simulation platform. A sunny day was simulated using the multi-domain model and the controllability of the plant was analyzed. At this stage, the study focused on the steam separator level regulation. A thermal-hydraulic study also focused on potential instabilities in the vaporizer that can occur under certain circumstances of water temperature at vaporizer inlet and solar heat flux. This analysis was carried out with a CATHARE standalone model. Perspectives of the present work include a complete validation of the developed models from future experimental data and further developments should aim to extend the modelling scope of the numerical simulator towards a representation of all the hydraulic parts of the CSP prototype. Control schemes and regulation tools would have to be extended as well in order to move towards a more representative control architecture of the prototype. Particularly, the steam quality at vaporizer outlet is an important variable to regulate. Indeed, this parameter is usually kept between 60% and 80% [3]. It must be high enough to limit the power consumption of the recirculation pump but not too high in order to prevent absorber dry-out.
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