Minimising mirror soiling of a PTC plant by an optimum wind barrier design

Abstract

This study presents a simulation-based optimisation of a solid wind barrier surrounding a parabolic trough collector plant to minimise dust soiling on the plant mirror facets. The results of the presented simulation show that designing and constructing a barrier is one of the effective approaches to mitigate airborne particles and, consequently, to significantly reduce water consumption in solar plants for mirror cleaning. It is shown that an optimum solid wind barrier could deflect more than 86% of the particles that pass over the solar field with a small fraction of around 0.8% of airborne particles being deposited on the mirrors.