Reliability Modelling of Central Receiver Power Plants

In solar power towers or central receiver generation units, solar radiation is concentrated on a central receiver placed at the top of a tower through a heliostat field. The concentrated solar energy can generate superheated steam in a Rankine cycle to produce electricity. Since solar energy fluctuates, the output power of solar tower power plants changes frequently, and many aspects of power networks incorporating high-capacity solar tower power plants may be affected, which must be investigated. For this purpose, this paper presents a reliability model for solar power generation units based on the failure of component devices and changes in produced power. To determine the reliability of these plants, the effects of failures in their elements, including the heliostat field, central receiver, thermodynamic cycle components, generator, cable, electrical converter, and transformer, on the overall outage are considered. To decrease the number of states related to the reliability model of the solar power generation unit, the XB criterion is selected for calculation, and a fuzzy c-means clustering approach is used. The proposed multi-state reliability model is implemented to evaluate the adequacy assessment of RBTS and IEEE-RTS as two reliability test systems. Important reliability indices, including load and energy-curtailed indices and those associated with the system's capability to supply the required load, are calculated.

کلیدواژه ها:

central receiver power plant ، heliostat field ، Reliability ، Rankine cycle ، fuzzy c-means clustering ، Solar radiation