Radiation Boundary Conditions for Computational Fluid Dynamics Models of High-Temperature Cavity Receivers

Rigorous computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes can accurately simulate complex coupled processes within an arbitrary geometry. CFD can thus be a cost-effective and time-efficient method of guiding receiver design and testing for concentrating solar power technologies. However, it can be computationally prohibitive to include a large multifaceted dish concentrator or a field of hundreds or thousands of heliostats in the model domain. This paper presents a method to allow the CFD code to focus on a cavity receiver domain alone, by rigorously transforming radiance distributions calculated on the receiver aperture into radiance boundary conditions for the CFD simulations. This method allows the incoming radiation to interact with participating media such as falling solid particles in a high-temperature cavity receiver. The radiance boundary conditions of the CFD model can take into consideration complex beam features caused by sun shape, limb darkening, slope errors, heliostat facet shape, multiple heliostats, off-axis aberrations, atmospheric effects, blocking, shading, and multiple focal points. This paper also details implementation examples in ANSYS FLUENT for a heliostat field and a dish concentrator, which are validated by comparison to results from DELSOL and the ray-tracing code ASAP, respectively. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4004274]