Browsing by Author "Palenzuela, Patricia"

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    Experimental assessment of a pilot scale hybrid cooling system for water consumption reduction in CSP plants
    (Elsevier, 2021-12-22) Palenzuela, Patricia; Roca, Lidia; Asfand, Faisal; Patchigolla, Kumar
    The new challenge of the European Commission is to limit water consumption in Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants, especially significant in the cooling process. Hybrid cooling systems are presented as a potential solution to achieve water consumption reduction since they also avoid a high penalty of efficiency loss in the power block. In this work, a hybrid cooling pilot plant installed at Plataforma Solar de Almería is evaluated experimentally. The system has been tested under different ambient and operating conditions to analyze their influence on the water and electricity consumption. The results reveal that significant water savings were achieved in comparison with the conventional only-wet configuration. Concretely, a maximum water consumption saving of 67% was found at high ambient temperatures (between 25 and 30 °C) and for a thermal load of 80% when a hybrid configuration was used. The optimal operating strategies that achieve a tradeoff between low water and electricity consumption have been identified by two efficiency indexes: the specific electricity and water consumption. The parallel configuration was the optimal one in most of the cases. At high ambient temperatures and 80% thermal load, the electricity and water consumptions of this configuration were 0.033 kWe/kWth and 0.071 L/kWth, respectively.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Thermodynamic performance and water consumption of hybrid cooling system configurations for concentrated solar power plants
    (MDPI, 2020-06-10) Asfand, Faisal; Palenzuela, Patricia; Roca, Lidia; Caron, Adèle; Lemarié, Charles-André; Gillard, Jon; Turner, Peter J.; Patchigolla, Kumar
    The use of wet cooling in Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants tends to be an unfavourable option in regions where water is scarce due to the high water requirements of the method. Dry-cooling systems allow a water consumption reduction of up to 80% but at the expense of lower electricity production. A hybrid cooling system (the combination of dry and wet cooling) offers the advantages of each process in terms of lower water consumption and higher electricity production. A model of a CSP plant which integrates a hybrid cooling system has been implemented in Thermoflex software. The water consumption and the net power generation have been evaluated for different configurations of the hybrid cooling system: series, parallel, series-parallel and parallel-series. It was found that the most favourable configuration in terms of water saving was series-parallel, in which a water reduction of up to 50% is possible compared to the only-wet cooling option, whereas an increase of 2.5% in the power generation is possible compared to the only-dry cooling option. The parallel configuration was the best in terms of power generation with an increase of 3.2% when compared with the only-dry cooling option, and a reduction of 30% water consumption compared to the only-wet cooling option