A methodology for the creep-fatigue analysis of external receivers for solar tower plants using real weather data.

Despite the large number of research studies about Solar Tower plants questions, remain on a wide range of topics including methods for the lifetime assessment of the receiver tubes under creep-fatigue damage. Most of the published works dealing with this task do not consider important aspects such as the impact of clouds passages, plastic deformations, or stress relaxation due to creep. In this study a methodology is proposed to assess the creep-fatigue lifetime of solar receivers based on real weather data. The presented approach requires as input the daily DNI profiles for the selected plant location which are used to assess the heat flux maps on the receiver. Then, the heat transfer phenomena occurring within the receiver are dynamically simulated in order to obtain the history of the temperature distributions on the receiver tubes. Lastly, the creep and fatigue damages accumulated during the operation are evaluated in each receiver point considering the effects of plastic deformations and stress relaxation. The proposed methodology is applied to a simple case study to estimate the creep and fatigue damages accumulated in a receiver flow path during a typical cloudy day. The results show that the fourth panel accumulates the maximum damage and the fatigue damage is negligible compared to the creep. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]