Experimental Performance of a Solar Collector in Solar Chimney Power Plant System

Solar chimney power plant has been proposed as a device to economically generate electricity from solar energy in large scale in the future. There are many factors to influence on the performance of the solar collector. This paper describes details of the experimental process on the thermal storage material in solar collector. Two experimental modifications are tried on the thermal storage material in collector: (1) Pebbles and (2) introducing the water tubes with a black surface and combining pebbles and the water tubes. The former modification helped in enhancing the air temperature difference of the collector, while the latter contributed to increasing the air temperature as well as the collector efficiency. Changing the packing height of the pebbles out of the water tubes, the height of the pebbles has been tested and optimized. Experimental performance results of this model is presented.