Hybrid solar-biomass power plant without energy storage

Non uniformity and high initial investment are the problems associated in solar energy technologies. Biomass power plant demands a huge amount of fuel feed which may not be available readily in all the places and times. A feed control in biomass fuel with variable solar radiation avoids the need of solar energy storage and saves the storage cost. In this work, solar parabolic collectors and biomass combustion have been arranged in parallel to produce steam for power generation. Solar energy is limited to a maximum share of 50% to avoid the operation of biomass combustion at low fuel feed rate in daytime. The performance characteristics of hybrid power plant have been developed with turbine inlet condition (pressure and temperature) and variation in solar energy sharing. The focused results are cycle thermal efficiency, hybrid plant thermal efficiency, plant fuel efficiency and specific power. The mass, energy and performance variations are studied under variable solar radiation. A case study has been carried out to validate the thermodynamic cycle results. The results show that the plant fuel energy efficiency increases from 16% to 29% with an increase in solar participation from 10% to 50% at the boiler pressure of 20 bar. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license