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oa The role of distributed solar heat engines in an age of mass market silicon PV
- الناشر: Hamad bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU Press)
- المصدر: QScience Proceedings, GCC Energy Security Symposium (Volume 2011, Issue 2), نوفمبر ٢٠١١, المجلد 2012, 26
ملخص
Solar thermal power generation faces stiff competition in markets which have become increasingly dominated by mass-manufactured silicon-PV. The thermal power generation community has therefore come to concentrate increasingly on the advantages that PV cannot offer: cheap energy storage and hybridisation with fossil fired cycles.
On a distributed/small scale the relative heat losses from and complexities involved in such schemes make them less attractive. However, the potential benefits of a distributed scale are the same that have underpinned the rise of silicon PV: rapid deployability, independence from lossy transmission infrastructure and often the ability to use free land.
A range of possibilities exist between efficient but expensive high-concentration systems (e.g. Dish-Stirling) at one end, and potentially cheaper but less efficient low-concentration systems (e.g. Non-Tracking collectors and ORC) at the other. In this talk I will draw on the examples of two British projects based in Oxford that approach these categories from a novel angle:
• A University project to develop a point-focus, two-axis tracking concentrator based on single-curvature mirrors.
• A project being conducted by Thermofluidics to develop a pumping engine without moving parts based on an Organic working fluid and a Stirling-like configuration.
I will provide a brief summary of the two technologies and their particularities and argue that the first is particularly well suited to Dish-Stirling systems in combination with storage or hybridisation, and the second to using non-tracking collectors or waste heat for applications such as remote fluid pumping, solar cooling and possibly potable water production through desalination/dehumidification.
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