Effects of material selection on the thermal stresses of tube receiver under concentrated solar irradiation

Material selection of tube receiver is a critical issue to ensure the reliability during its whole service life. In this study, the thermal stress analyses of tube receiver under concentrated solar irradiation condition using various materials are carried out. The concentrated solar irradiation heat flux distribution is obtained by Monte-Carlo ray tracing method and used as boundary conditions of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis. The CFD analysis will solve the temperature fields and the resulted temperature fields defined at the nodes of CFD analysis meshes are interpolated as input data to the nodes of the thermal stress analysis meshes. The temperature fields, thermal stress fields of various material conditions are obtained in the numerical analysis. The numerical results show that the temperature gradients and effective stresses of the stainless steel and silicon carbide (SiC) conditions are significantly higher than that of the aluminum and copper conditions. The stress failure ratio is introduced to assess the thermal stress level of each material condition. The stainless steel condition has the highest stress failure ratio and the copper condition has the lowest stress failure ratio. From the standpoint of thermal stress, copper is recommended to be the material of tube receiver. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.