Heat transfer experiments with a central receiver tube subjected to unsteady and non-

uniform heat flux

María Fernández-Torrijos, Carolina Marugán-Cruz, Celia Sobrino, and Domingo Santana

Citation: AIP Conference Proceedings 1850, 150002 (2017); doi: 10.1063/1.4984531

View online: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4984531
View Table of Contents: http://aip.scitation.org/toc/apc/1850/1
Published by the American Institute of Physics

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 Heat Transfer Experiments with a Central Receiver Tube
Subjected to Unsteady and Non-uniform Heat Flux
María Fernández-Torrijos1*, Carolina Marugán-Cruz1, Celia Sobrino1,
Domingo Santana1
1
Departamento de Ingeniería Térmica y de Fluidos, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Avda. De la Universidad, 30.
28911, Leganés (Madrid) Spain.

*Corresponding author. Tel.: +34916246223. E-mail address: ftorrijo@ing.uc3m.es

Abstract. In this work, a molten salt test loop to study the heat transfer process in external molten salt receivers is
described. The experimental installation is formed by a cylindrical molten salt tank, a pump, a flow meter, and an
induction heater to generate the heat flux, which is applied in a small rectangular region of the tube surface. In central
tower plants, the external receiver pipe is considered to be under unilateral concentrated solar radiation, because only one
side of the pipe receives high heat flux. The main advantage of using an induction heater is the control of heating in
different areas of the tube. In order to measure the effects of a non-homogenous and unsteady heat flux on the wall
temperature distribution a series of experiments have been carried out. 4 K-type thermocouples have been welded at
different axial and azimuthal positions of the pipe to obtain the wall temperature distribution. Different temperature
measurements have been made varying the heat flux and water velocity to study their effects on the heat transfer process.

Keywords: external receiver, non-uniform heat flux, Biot number.

INTRODUCTION
Central tower power plants are one of the most efficient concentrating solar power technologies. With the aim of
reducing the cost of energy from concentrating solar power technologies, the efficiency of the different components
must be increased without compromising its durability. The central receiver is one of the key components and it is
exposed to extreme conditions, with a non-uniform solar flux on the receiver that can reach up to 1.0 MW/m2[1].
Experimental facilities are essential to test new receiver designs and to generate data needed in the simulation of
the different components of power plants. Apart from the experience acquired with the plants Solar Two [2],
Gemasolar [3,4] and Targasonne [5], very few experimental facilities allow to study the heat transfer characteristics
of the tube receivers of molten salt power towers. For example, heat transfer coefficients for the internal flow of the
molten salt were measured in the laminar-turbulent transition [6] and turbulent regime [7] in a molten salt loop
facility, where the molten salt exchanged heat with a mineral oil in a concentric tubes heat exchanger. The same
installation was used to validate the CFD simulation [8] reporting the temperatures of the molten salt and the tube
wall of a tube exposed to a heat flux distribution characteristic of a power tower plant (one side of the tube adiabatic
and the other side with a cosine shape heat flux profile). However, in the experimental set-up the molten salt was
heated in the test section, by an electrical heater with a maximum power of 40 kW, producing a constant heat flux on
the receiver tube.
Very few dynamic simulations of molten salt receivers, verified with experiments, have been published in the
literature, most of them concerning cavity receivers [9]. However, these models and their experimental validation
are important to predict the dynamic characteristics of molten salt receivers for various weather conditions and to
design the operation strategy.

SolarPACES 2016
AIP Conf. Proc. 1850, 150002-1–150002-6; doi: 10.1063/1.4984531
Published by AIP Publishing. 978-0-7354-1522-5/$30.00

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 EXPERIMENTAL SET-UP
The molten salt test loop (Fig. 1) consists of a cylindrical molten salt tank, a pump, a pressure sensor, the test
section and a flow meter. The total length of the loop is more than 12 m long. The test loop has been designed so
that a molten-salt fluid mixture (60% NaNO3 and 40% KNO3 by weight) will be used in the experiments. The 600 l
tank is made of 316 stainless steel and heated by an electrical furnace. The temperature of the molten salt in the tank
is controlled in order to keep it between 300 ºC and 500 ºC. A high temperature pump coupled to an electric motor
equipped with a variable-frequency drive allows varying the flow rate through molten salt loop. The tank is
connected to a stainless steel 316L pipe through which the molten salt circulates reaching Reynolds number in the
range of 10000-50000. A melt pressure sensor is installed to detect an eventual plug of the pipe due to the salt
solidification. The pipe is wrapped with electrical heaters and it is thermally insulated to avoid salt freezing and heat
losses. The test section consists of a 60 mm outer diameter and 4 mm thickness tube, exposed to an induction heat
generator with an output power of 6 kW and output frequency range of 270-450 kHz. The inductor coil is provided
with a magnetic flux concentrator made of a ferromagnetic composite material, whose main function is to
concentrate the coil’s current in the area of the coil facing the workpiece. In this set of experiments, a rectangular
induction coil of 100 mm x 10 mm has been used to heat the pipe. In central tower plants, the external receiver pipe
is considered to be under unilateral concentrated solar radiation, because only one side of tube receives high heat
flux, whereas the rear side of the pipe is almost adiabatic. In the test section of the installation, the tube is exposed to
a heat flux generated by the inductor and applied to a small rectangular region of the tube surface, so the inductor
suitably reproduces the heating conditions of the receiver in a central tower plant. An ultrasonic flow meter
measures the flow rate through the pipe. Type K fiberglass insulated thermocouples are used to measure the
temperature of the external surface of the pipe. Thermocouples were calibrated and they presented an uncertainty of
±0.7ºC. Figure 2 shows a schematic diagram of the experimental system.
To study the effects of a non-homogenous and unsteady heat flux on the wall temperature distribution, a set of
experiments were performed, varying the power of the induction heater. Furthermore, as variations in the
temperature of the molten salt due to changes in ambient conditions such as clouds are typically controlled varying
the flow rate, additional experiments were conducted varying this parameter to analyze the transient performance of
the receiver.
In this work, the installation start-up was done, so water was used as the working fluid, due to the lower working
temperatures in comparison with molten salt. Once the installation operation is controlled using water as the
working fluid, experiments with molten salt will be accomplished.
In the experiments shown in this work, the wall temperature of the tube receiver was measured using 4 K-type
thermocouples, which were placed at different angular and axial positions along the test section exposed to the
induction coil. In order to achieve reliable wall temperature measurements, the thermocouples have been spot-
welded to the surface of the pipe. The whole length of the test section is 53.5 cm, and the thermocouples have been
located at the positions of 18 cm and 26 cm of the inlet. Therefore, one pair of thermocouples has been located 3 cm
before the influence area of the rectangular induction coil, while the other pair has been placed in the middle of the
influence area. The azimuthal position of the induction coil (θ=-45º measured from horizontal line) has been
considered the azimuthal reference position. In each axial position, one thermocouple is located slightly over the
rectangular induction coil (θ=38º), while the other thermocouple has been positioned in the rear side of the induction
coil (θ=172º). Figure 3 shows the three-dimensional detail of the test section, which contains a detailed view of the
different positions of the thermocouples located in the test section. Apart from this 4 K-type thermocouples, the
installation has another 6 K-type thermocouples. One of them is spot-welded to the external surface of the pipe
section where the flow meter is located, in order to measure the wall temperature without the influence of the
induction heater. Another three thermocouples are located at three different heights inside the tank to keep the
molten salt between 300 ºC and 500 ºC, and another thermocouple is placed in the molten-salt inflow of the tank.
Besides, a thermocouple in the tank bottom is installed to control the temperature of the molten salt during the tank
discharge.
The maximum wall temperature reached using water as the working fluid was around 35 º C, so it was not
necessary to control the water temperature inside the tank. Therefore, in this set of experiments, only the 4
thermocouples welded in the test section were used to obtain the wall temperature distribution. For data acquisition,
the universal analogue input module 9219 of National Instruments has been used. This module has 4 channels and
presents the advantage of having channel-to-channel isolation, so that each channel is isolated from every other

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channel and other non-isolated components, in order to reject noise between channels and electromagnetic noise
from the inductor heater.
To investigate the influence of the heat flux on the wall temperature distribution, different experiments were
performed for heat fluxes (output power per unit of coil surface area) of 0.9 and 1.8 MW/m2 generated by the
rectangular induction coil. In addition, the flow rate was varied to study its influence on the wall temperature
profiles. Reynolds number of the internal flow in molten salts external receivers are approximately 104-105 so, in
this work, experiments with water velocities of 1 and 2 m/s were performed, which correspond to Reynolds numbers
of 6.7·104 and 1,35·105, respectively. Water velocity was measured with an ultrasonic flow meter.
The experiments were conducted following the same heating sequence with time: for the first minute, the heat
flux increased up to the maximum established in each case (0.9 or 1.8 MW/m2), which remained constant for the
following 5 minutes. Finally, for the last minute, the heat flux decreased until the induction coil was off. Therefore,
the duration of each experiment was around 7 minutes.

Inductor

Pump

Molten salt tank

Flow meter

FIGURE 1. Photograph of the molten salt test loop.

FIGURE 2. Schematic diagram of the experimental system. DAQ means “data acquisition system” and TC means
“thermocouple”.

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 FIGURE 3. Three dimensional detail of the test section, including the pipe and the induction coil. Dimensions in mm.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In this work, 4 different experiments varying heat flux and also water velocity were conducted. Figure 4 shows
the wall temperature evolution with time for different axial and azimuthal positions for each experiment: a) q=1.8
MW/m2 and v= 1 m/s, b) q=1.8 MW/m2 and v= 2 m/s, c) q=0.9 MW/m2 and v= 1 m/s, d) q=0.9 MW/m2 and v=2
m/s. Besides, the heating sequence with time for each experiment is included in Fig. 4. All cases show that the
highest temperature corresponds to the front side of the pipe located in the middle of the influence area of the
induction coil (TC-1), while the rear side is almost not affected by the heat flux (TC-2 and TC-4). The front side
immediately before the influence area of the induction coil (TC-3) is also affected by heat flux.
As expected, higher heat flux (Fig. 4 (a) and 4 (b)) results in higher temperatures in the front side of the tube,
while the rear side of the pipe is barely affected by the heat flux generated by the inductor heater. Therefore, the
temperature measured by the thermocouples placed at the rear side of the pipe was approximately equal to the
temperature of the flowing water. Marugán-Cruz et al. [10] simulated the heat transfer in a circular tube with a non-
uniform heat flux with a fluid flowing inside the tube. They showed that for high Biot number (Bi =he/ks, where h
is the internal flow convection heat transfer coefficient, e is the thickness of the tube and ks is the tube thermal
conductivity), the radial heat flux is dominant, with stronger temperature gradients in the radial direction than in the
axial and circumferential direction. Biot numbers for the tube studied here are in the order of 1-3; suggesting that the
thermocouple TC-3 measures a high temperature because it is in the area directly heated by the induction heater,
despite the use of flux concentrator in the inductor coil reduces the power outside the coil face zone.
Regarding water velocity, Fig. 4 (a) and 4 (c) for water velocity of 1 m/s show lightly higher temperatures in the
front side of the tube in comparison with Fig. 4 (b) and 4 (d) for water velocity of 2 m/s, because the increase in
velocity enhances the heat transfer, so that the wall temperature is reduced. These measurements are in accordance
with the CFD results obtained by Yang et al. [8], and also the numerical results provided by Flores et al. [11]

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 FIGURE 4. Experimental measurements of wall temperatures in the test section for different heat fluxes and water velocities.

CONCLUSIONS
In this work, the effect of a non-homogenous and unsteady heat flux on the wall temperature distribution of a
molten salt receiver tube was studied. Therefore, a molten salt test loop to simulate the heat transfer process in an
external receiver was started-up. Wall temperature measurements for different axial and azimuthal positions were
performed for different heat fluxes and water velocities, to study their influence on the wall temperature evolution
with time. The wall temperature distribution was uneven due to the non-uniform incident heat flux generated by the
induction coil, which was applied in a small rectangular area of the tube surface. Therefore, the temperature of the
tube zone that faces the coil increased due to the heat flux provided by the inductor, whereas the temperature of the
rear-tube section was not affected.
As expected, higher heat flux resulted in higher temperatures in the front side of the tube, and greater differences
between the front and rear sides; whereas higher flow velocities resulted in slightly lower temperatures in the front
side of the tube, due to the enhanced heat transfer between the water and the tube wall.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank the financial support from Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Projects
ENE2012-34255 and ENE2014-54942-R) and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport under the program of
Formación del Profesorado Universitario.

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