Hi, I am working on solar thermal system, I have to use evacuated tube collectors and to make steam which can be used in process area. I want to simulate my model through CFD so please tell me in which way CFD can help me.Thanks

Do you want to model the radiation part of the simulation that triggers the evaporation? If this the case you will need to account for the "light" heating effect and have a CFD code that can incorpororate a good radiation model. If you need a commercial code that you can personalise check out CFX at www.cfx.aeat.com.

Hi ZEESHAN,

We (Solar Research Facilities Unit, Weizmann Institute of Science) also work on solar thermal systems, although we deal with volumetric cavity absorbers. Our approach is to use a commercial CFD package that

1. allows for a general transport equations system

2. enables user intervention in most parts of the solution through user routines.

In addition, we use two radiation solvers we developed (a surface-to-surface code and a participating code). Recently we also use a chemical kinetics package (Chemkin-II) for reactive systems.

We then couple all of them together, so that given temperature, the radiative sources are calculated and passed as source terms to the CFD, which in turn calculates new temperature field.

I hope this helps,

Rami