Design and Analysis of Tower Structure for Solar Thermal Power Plant

Abstract

World is witnessing the shift of global dependencies from fossil fuels to renewable resources. Solar thermal power plants are now replacing conventional power plants for the power production. There is a dire need to design new technologies for clean power generation. In this paper solar tower structure is designed for a 50MW solar thermal power plant. A review of different types of towers used in solar thermal power plant is included at the start. Design process of tower structure is started by designing a tower structure based on the height requirement obtained from ray trace analysis. Then three variants of this structure are designed using angles of different cross section. All variants are analyzed using CAE software and deformation is calculated. Plots of deformation, bending moments and shear force are included. A comparison of all these structures is carried out and the structure which shows minimum deformation is finalized.