Abstract:
To address the severe local overheating issue that occurs when a solar cavity receiver drives a biomass gasification reactor, this study establishes the physical and mathematical models of photothermal conversion between the heliostat field and the cavity receiver using the ray-tracing method. The variation in the optical efficiency of a single heliostat under real-time and timed tracking modes is analyzed. Meanwhile, the heat flux distributions on the absorbing surface of the cavity receiver under single-point focusing and multi-point zonal focusing strategies are compared. The results indicate that, under the boundary conditions adopted in this study, namely 100 heliostats, a single-heliostat size of 10 m × 10 m, a receiver aperture center elevation of 85 m, a receiver inclination angle of 25°, a mirror reflectivity of 0.9, and DNI calculated based on local longitude, latitude, and time parameters, by employing the multi-point zonal focusing strategy, the peak heat flux on the absorbing surface sharply drops from 380 kW/m
2 to 100 kW/m
2, achieving a reduction of over 70%. Concurrently, the average heat flux is reduced to one-fifth of its original value, significantly mitigating the issue of excessive heat flux concentration. On this basis, to alleviate the mechanical wear and additional energy consumption caused by high-frequency tracking, a synergistic tracking strategy coupling timed-tracking with multi-point focusing is proposed. Simulations demonstrate that this strategy not only strictly limits the overall optical efficiency penalty of the heliostat field to within ±2%, but also substantially reduces the adjustment frequency and additional energy consumption of the heliostats. Moreover, it induces a periodic variation in the localized high heat flux zones. This dynamically varying concentrating characteristic can not only effectively balance the thermal stress distribution across the receiver surface, but also help reduce the local thermal fatigue risk caused by the long-term residence of static hot spots, thus providing a strong guarantee for the efficient, long-term, and safe operation of the biomass gasification system.