Development of an innovative code for the design of thermodynamic solar power plants part B: Performance assessment of commercial and innovative technologies

This paper presents the development and testing of an innovative code for the prediction of thermodynamic performances at nominal conditions, as well as a preliminary plant sizing and investment costs estimation for different parabolic trough solar fields. Part A of the paper presented in detail the model and validated it toward existing plants. This part discusses potentialities of the PATTO code (Parabolic Trough Thermodynamic Optimization) in terms of the capability (i) to compare the HCEs performances of various manufacturers, (ii) to accomplish an economic analysis and evaluate the specific investment costs of different technologies, (iii) to carry out a sensitivity analysis on the HCE performances and (iv) to implement innovative plant configurations. The potentiality of the economic analysis has been tested toward the recently built Nevada Solar One plant, while the sensitivity analysis of collector performances has been validated with a parametric study found in literature. PATTO allowed to propose and test an original hybrid solution with potential thermodynamic and economic advantages: results obtained by the code at nominal conditions show an efficiency gain of 1.2% points and potential investment costs saving of 6.5% with respect to a state-of-the-art reference plant.