Simulation of a Solar Thermal Central Receiver Power Plant

As the successor of the SOLGAS Project(see [10] in [6]and [3]), which investigated the technical and economical viability of the combination of a solar thermal Central Receiver with a conventional fuel operated power plant, the Colón Solar project is dealing with the actual engineering phase of such a plant. The goal of the study is twofold: First, to investigate control strategies that can handle the steep power gradients caused by cloud shadows on the heliostat field. Second, to estimate the annual thermal gain from the heliostat field to the main power cycle as accurately as possible. Object-oriented modeling techniques are used in order to achieve maximum flexibility when simulating different plant designs and maximum benefit from code reuse. The same code for the plant structure can be used for underlying physical models in different degrees of detail. The very fast insolation transients during cloud traversal require special numerical treatment. A novel approach of integrating the calculation of steam properties into dynamic simulation has been implemented successfully.