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Two of the main environmental problems of today’s society are the continuously increasing production of organic wastes as well as the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the related green house effect. A way to solve these problems is the production of biogas. Biogas is a combustible gas consisting of methane, carbon dioxide and small amounts of other gases and trace elements. Production of biogas through anaerobic digestion of animal manure and slurries as well as of a wide range of digestible organic wastes and agricultural residues, converts these substrates into electricity and heat and offers a natural fertiliser for agriculture. The microbiological process of decomposition of organic matter, in the absence of oxygen takes place in reactors, called digesters. Biogas can be used as a fuel in a gas turbine or burner and can be used in a hybrid solar tower system offering a solution for waste treatment of agricultural and animal residues. A solar tower system consists of a heliostat field, which concentrates direct solar irradiation on an open volumetric central receiver. The receiver heats up ambient air to temperatures of around 700°C. The hot air’s heat energy is transferred to a steam Rankine cycle in a heat recovery steam generator (HRSG). The steam drives a steam turbine, which in turn drives a generator for producing electricity. In order to increase the operational hours of a solar tower power plant, a heat storage system and/ or hybridization may be considered. The advantage of solar-fossil hybrid power plants, compared to solar-only systems, lies in low additional investment costs due to an adaptable solar share and reduced technical and economical risks. On sunny days the hybrid system operates in a solar-only mode with the central receiver and on cloudy days and at night with the gas turbine only. As an alternative to methane gas, environmentally neutral biogas can be used for operating the gas turbine. Hence, the hybrid system is operated to 100% from renewable energy sources
The production of dispatchable renewable energy will be one of the most important key factors of the future energy supply. Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants operated with molten salt as heat transfer and storage media are one opportunity to meet this challenge. Due to the high concentration factor of the solar tower technology the maximum process temperature can be further increased which ultimately decreases the levelized costs of electricity of the technology (LCOE). The development of an improved tubular molten salt receiver for the next generation of molten salt solar tower plants is the aim of this work. The receiver is designed for a receiver outlet temperature up to 600 °C. Together with a complete molten salt system, the receiver will be integrated into the Multi-Focus-Tower (MFT) in Jülich (Germany). The paper describes the basic engineering of the receiver, the molten salt tower system and a laboratory corrosion setup.
An approach to automatically generate a dynamic energy simulation model in Modelica for a single existing building is presented. It aims at collecting data about the status quo in the preparation of energy retrofits with low effort and costs. The proposed method starts from a polygon model of the outer building envelope obtained from photogrammetrically generated point clouds. The open-source tools TEASER and AixLib are used for data enrichment and model generation. A case study was conducted on a single-family house. The resulting model can accurately reproduce the internal air temperatures during synthetical heating up and cooling down. Modelled and measured whole building heat transfer coefficients (HTC) agree within a 12% range. A sensitivity analysis emphasises the importance of accurate window characterisations and justifies the use of a very simplified interior geometry. Uncertainties arising from the use of archetype U-values are estimated by comparing different typologies, with best- and worst-case estimates showing differences in pre-retrofit heat demand of about ±20% to the average; however, as the assumptions made are permitted by some national standards, the method is already close to practical applicability and opens up a path to quickly estimate possible financial and energy savings after refurbishment.