Evaluation of the Optical and Thermal Performance of a 100 kWe Micro-Solar Tower Power Plant in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case of Chad

Abstract This work aims to determine the optical and thermal performance of a 100 kWe micro tower power plant equipped with a 3D compound parabolic concentrator (CPC). The sizing of the heliostat field and the 3D CPC was carried out. A matlab code has been developed to configure the heliostats in the field. The ray tracing tool (soltrace) combined with a solarpilot optimization tool is used to evaluate the optical and thermal performance of the solar field. The design results gave a total heliostat area of 922 m2. Heliostats of 2 m2 of the unit area were chosen, which gave some 461 heliostats. The acceptance and inclination angles of 26 deg and 52 deg, respectively, were found. An optimum height of 28 m was obtained. A total efficiency of 62.23% and an incident flux on a flat receiver of 884.02 kW/m2 were obtained.