Preliminary comparison of two potential test methods for molten salt receiver under uniformly and Gaussian-shape distributed incident power

摘要

Molten salt receiver is a critical equipment in solar power tower plant. It is essential to establish a test method to evaluate receiver performance. This paper applies the standard test method of solar collector to molten salt receiver. Inspired by the collector test method, a new test method is proposed based on the operating characteristics of solar power tower plant. Multiple simulations with different receivers and test conditions are run to compare the performance of the two methods. The comparisons show that both methods should are feasible with acceptable relative errors. However, the relative error of single test can be significant. It is suggested that both methods should be used with causion if test number is not sufficient.