Electricity production with low grade heat in thermal power plants by design improvement of a hybrid dry cooling tower and a solar chimney concept

In this study, an improved concept design is presented to increase the thermal efficiency of the Rankine cycle of a typical steam power plant by combining a solar chimney and a dry cooling tower. The sources of the wind energy generation, include: the rejected heat from condenser to the air entering dry cooling tower, solar radiation and the airlift pumping effect on the air flow created by the stack hot flue gas which is injected into the hybrid tower as a novel change. This research primarily focuses on the Shahid Rajaee 250 MW steam power plant to determine the velocity of generated flow at the turbine inlet; a numerical finite volume code was employed for a dry cooling tower having a base diameter and a chimney height of 250 and 200 m, respectively. Calculations have been iterated for different angles of chimney walls, slopes of collectors and the base ground to find their effects on the output power. A range of 360 kW to more than 4.4 MW power is captured by the wind turbine by changing the hybrid tower geometrical parameters. Obtained results reveal a maximum of 0.538% increase for the thermal efficiency of the fossil fuel power plant. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.