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Solar Energy 85 (2011) 334343 www.elsevier.com/locate/solener

Heliostat eld layout optimization for high-temperature solar thermochemical processing

Robert Pitz-Paal a,, Nicolas Bayer Botero a, Aldo Steinfeld b,c
b a DLR, Institute of Technical Thermodynamics, Linder Ho he, D-51147 Ko ln, Germany ETH Zurich, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland c Paul Scherer Institute, Solar Technology Laboratory, 5232 Villigen, Switzerland

Received 6 July 2009; received in revised form 13 October 2010; accepted 18 November 2010 Available online 30 December 2010 Communicated by: Associate Editor L. Vant-Hull

Abstract The layout of the heliostat eld of solar tower systems is optimized for maximum annual solar-to-chemical energy conversion eciency in high-temperature thermochemical processes for solar fuels production. The optimization algorithm is based on the performance function that includes heliostat characteristics, secondary optics, and chemical receiverreactor characteristics at representative time steps for evaluating the annual fuel production rates. Two exemplary applications for solar fuels production are selected: the thermal reduction of zinc oxide as part of a two-step water-splitting cycle for hydrogen production, and the coal gasication for syngas production. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Solar chemistry; Solar tower; Central receiver; Heliostat eld; High temperature; Thermochemical

1. Introduction Solar thermochemical reactors for fuels production operating at above 1000 K are being designed for solar tower systems capable of delivering high solar ux densities in the multi-MW power scale (Steinfeld, 2005). The design and optimization of such receiverreactors are usually performed on the basis of a pre-dened solar ux density as boundary condition (Pitman and Vant-Hull, 1986). Because of the high temperature requirement, the desired solar concentration ratios should be signicantly higher than those encountered in solar power tower systems for Rankine-based electricity generation, which typically operate at an upper temperature of about 750 K and solar concentration ratios around 500 suns (1 sun = 1 kW/m2). In
Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 2203 601 2744; fax: +49 2203 601 4141. E-mail address: robert.pitz-paal@dlr.de (R. Pitz-Paal).

contrast, solar thermochemical plants usually operate at above 1000 K and require solar concentration ratios exceeding 1500 suns. Thus, as higher solar ux densities have a direct impact on the optical performance of the solar eld, the overall optimization for maximum solarto-chemical energy conversion eciency needs to consider the coupled eld and receiver design parameters. Several authors have discussed the layout of central receiver concepts for applications requiring high-ux densities and high-temperature levels (Pitman and Vant-Hull, 1986; Segal and Epstein, 1999, 2003; Vant-Hull et al., 1999). In these previous studies, the energetic characteristics of the conceptual application were not integrated directly into the layout developing procedure. Instead, a xed ux density was used as boundary condition. This paper presents a novel approach to optimize the heliostat eld design and layout for high-temperature solar thermochemical processes that integrates the energetic behavior of the intended application. The approach is

0038-092X/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.solener.2010.11.018

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Nomenclature Ahelio reective area of heliostat eld (m2) Aaperture aperture area of cavity-receiver (m2) Areaction surface available to chemical reaction (m2) cp specic heat capacity of reacting stream (kJ kg1 K1) DHr specic enthalpy change of reaction (kJ kg1) EA apparent activation energy (kJ mol1) g0 optical eciency gsolar-to-chemical solar-to-chemical energy conversion eciency greactor reactor eciency DNI direct normal irradiance (W/m2) k0 pre-exponential kinetic factor (kg s1 m2) m reaction rate (kg s1) Preaction power consumed by chemical reaction (kW) Psolarin solar power into receiver aperture (kW) Pthermallosses reactor thermal losses (kW) R specic ideal gas constant (J kg1 K1) v chemical conversion

based on the HFLCAL modeling code (Schwarzbo zl et al., 2009), originally developed for solar electricity generation systems. The optimization procedure is applied to two exemplary processes for solar fuels production, namely: the solar thermal reduction of zinc oxide at 2000 K as part of a two-step water-splitting cycle for hydrogen production (Schunk et al., 2009b), and the coal gasication at 1400 K for syngas production (ZGraggen et al., 2006). The annual eciency data obtained for the optimized high-ux solar tower systems are compared with those obtained with the conventional low-ux solar tower systems for power levels of 1, 10, and 100 MW. A sensitivity analysis is performed for the heliostat beam quality, tower height, and reactive surfaces. 2. Model description The calculation of the eld performance is briey sketched here; a more detailed description of the computing code has been previously presented (Schwarzbo zl et al., 2009). 2.1. Field performance The calculation of the annual eld performance is based on the hourly performance on the 21st of every month with clear sky conditions. The sunshape is assumed as a circularnormal distribution with the same root-mean-square deviation from the central ray which has been shown to be an appropriate statistical approximation (Pettit et al., 1983). The code considers the changing solar position and accounts for cosine losses, imperfect reections, atmospheric attenuation, shading and blocking, spillage transmissions losses in the secondary concentrator, and receiver losses. The determination of a specic eld layout is depicted in Fig. 1. Starting with a set of hypothetical heliostat positions, the performance of each heliostat is calculated. Afterwards, the set of heliostats is ranked based on the annual energy performance per area of reective surface to determine the best set of heliostats yielding a

given design power. In earlier studies, the performance calculation for a single time point was compared to that obtained with complex ray-tracing software with good agreement (Schmitz et al., 2006). Temporal disturbances are not considered by the present quasi-dynamic approach. As the integration of irradiated solar energy during a typical meteorological year matches the sum of irradiated energy during the time step series, the annual performance estimation can be considered as a theoretical maximum achievable. 2.2. Receiver model The main fundamental dierence between the present optimization applied for solar chemical tower systems using a specied chemical process and that applied for solar power tower systems using a specic heat transfer uid (e.g. steam, salt, air) is that the chemical reaction rate cannot be controlled independently (e.g. by adjusting the mass ow rates), but strongly depends on the reaction temperature, which in turn is a function of the solar concentration ratio delivered by the heliostat eld and the heat/mass transfer within the receiverreactor. The receiverreactor model links the intercepted solar radiation with the specic chemical reaction and computes the reactor eciency in terms of greactor mT vT DH r T P solarin 1

with v being the chemical conversion. For the coal gasication case, v is calculated based on the chemical equilibrium. For the zinc oxide reduction case, v is set to zero below the boiling point of zinc otherwise to one. The nominal reaction temperature results from the energy balance in the reactor, g0 P solarin P reaction T P thermallosses T 2

where Psolarin denotes the solar power input, and the two terms on the right hand side denote the power consumed by the endothermic chemical reaction and the thermal

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Fig. 1. Scheme of the layout developing procedure.

10
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a
Flux Density [MW/m2]

10
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b
0.27 0.36

Flux Density [MW/m2]

8 6
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4
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0.45 0.72 0.45 0.36

0
0.5 1.0 Aperture Area [m2] 1.5 2.0

0.18

0.5

1.0 Aperture Area [m2]

1.5

2.0

Fig. 2. Receiverreactor model correlation of reactor eciency, ux density and aperture area: (a) zinc oxide reduction; (b) coal gasication.

0.6

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a
0.5 0.6

b
Efficiency [-]

Efficiency [-]

0.4
total reactor

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total reactor optical

0.3

optical

0.4

0.2 0 1 2 3 Thermal Losses [kW/m2 ] 4

0.3 0 1 2 3 Thermal Losses [kW/m2 ] 4

Fig. 3. Impact of thermal losses on overall, optical and reactor eciencies: (a) zinc oxide reduction; (b) coal gasication.

losses. The reaction temperature varies with time as Psolarin varies along the day/year. Consequently, the heliostat eld optimization cannot be performed under the generic assumption of a constant reactor temperature and thereby independently of the chemical reaction but needs to

consider the specic characteristics of the chemical process aecting Preaction and the specic reactor design that inuences Pthermallosses. The following assumptions are made to estimate the upper performance limit of a reactor without detailed knowledge of the reactor design:

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Fig. 4. Design parameter for (a) heliostat eld position; (b) solar receiverreactor.

 the reactor temperature is uniform,  convection and conduction heat losses are neglected,  transient heat losses during start-up and shut-down are neglected,  reaction achieves completion, e.g. there are no chemical side products considered,  no purge gases are used. Thus,  Z P reaction T mT DH r T P thermalloss T Aaperture erT 4
T

 cp dT 3 4

T in

The generic solar chemical reactor, schematically depicted in Fig. 4b, consists of a cylindrical cavity-receiver containing a windowed aperture and a CPC. It has been scaled up in size based on data obtained from solar furnace tests and numerical simulations (Schunk et al., 2009a,b; ZGraggen et al., 2006; Schunk and Steinfeld, 2009). Scaling up to higher design power levels was performed by keeping the reaction surface Areaction linearly increasing with Psolarin. The reaction rate is given by   EA mT Areaction k 0 exp 5 RT For the zinc oxide reduction: ZnO ! Zn 0:5O2 6

depicted in Fig. 2 for zinc oxide reduction (Fig. 2a) and coal gasication (Fig. 2b). We assume that the presented formulation for the receiverreactor gives an estimation of the theoretical upper limit of the radiation to the reactor eciency depending on the solar ux density. To ensure that the further results concerning the optical subsystem are not inuenced by the idealizations within the receiver model we introduced a thermal loss per unit reactor surface varying from 0 (baseline case) to 4 kW/m2. The results are shown in Fig. 3 and follow the method described in Section 3: each data point represents the arithmetic average of 10 optimizations runs and is subject to a small spread, expressed in terms of the standard deviation. In both cases, the decrease in the overall eciency traces back to the decrease in the reactor eciency: the standard deviation of the optical eciency of the ve data points (losses greater zero) is of the same magnitude as the standard deviation of the corresponding baseline design point (no thermal loss) (ZnO: 0.0048 vs. 0.0040 ; coal: 0.0012 vs. 0.0048). Hence, our results concerning the optical eciency are independent of the idealizations within the thermal model of the receiverreactor, but the energetic characteristics of the receiverreactor impose constrains on the eld eciency. 3. Optimization The task of nding an optimum value of an objective function in a multidimensional parameter space is challenging (Carrol et al., 1999). There is a strong indication that the objective function exhibits a highly multimodal behavior with a high number of local maxima within a small spread. 3.1. Optimization problem Target function for the optimization is the average annual solar-to-chemical energy conversion eciency, dened as: P all time steps mT DH r T gsolar-to-chemical P 8 all time steps DNI AHelio

the Arrhenius parameters are EA = 361 kJ/mol and k0 = 14.03 106 kg/(s m2) (Schunk et al., 2009b). For coal gasication, C H2 O ! CO H2 7

the Arrhenius parameters are EA = 43.154 kJ/mol and k0 = 0.2846 kg/s m2 (where carbon is available in the form of petcoke) (ZGraggen et al., 2006). The receiverreactor models yield a correlation between reactor eciency, ux density, and aperture area, which is

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This denition considers the sensible heat as an energetic by-product without value. This is due to the fact that some chemical reactions require a fast cool-down (quenching) of the product gases to avoid recombination. We chose the main design parameters determining the layout of the heliostat eld, the shape of the secondary concentrator, and reactor geometry to be free parameters subject to optimization. The selected parameters are:  heliostat eld spacing parameters (AR, BR and AU, BU see Fig. 4),  angle of sight of the secondary concentrator (a generic CPC), that also denes the ratio of inlet and outlet aperture,  angle between the horizontal and the optical axis of the secondary concentrator and receiverreactor compound of the aperture U.  aperture radius of the reactor, which matches the outlet radius of the CPC (Fig. 4b). Other design parameters which are kept xed or are subject to the sensitivity analysis are given in Table 1 according to the specic design power level. 3.2. Optimization approach Three dierent optimization algorithms and their combinations were applied for the optimization of this sevendimensional problem, namely: an implementation of a genetic algorithm (Carrol et al., 1999), the NelderMead algorithm (Press et al., 1992), and the Powell algorithm (Press et al., 1992). Since the latter showed poor performance, the coupled genetic algorithm with the Nelder Mead algorithm was selected. The genetic algorithm is a heuristic optimization approach. It initially discretizes the allowed parameter space and creates a number of parameter vectors (called population) distributed randomly over the parameter space. Afterwards, the value of the objective function (called tness) for each individual parameter vector is calculated. From this population, a certain number of individuals with the best tness are selected, recombined, and subject to random mutation to form the subsequent generation. The random number generator is based on an initial arbitrary seed value and therefore allows creating
Table 1 Baseline design parameters. Design powera (MW) 1 10 100b S + SW + SE (36 + 32 + 32)
a b

dierent optimization runs within the same parameter space. The termination criterion is a given population size and number of generations. Due to the discretization of the parameter space, nding the actual value of the optimum is highly unlikely. This part is addressed by the NelderMead algorithm, which belongs to the hill climbing search methods and can be used for non-linear unimodal functions. The algorithm most likely converges directly into the local maximum next to its starting point. The termination criterion in this case is a given minimum change between two function evaluations. Our approach is to set-up the genetic algorithm to explore the parameter extensively and search for a parameter vector close to the global maximum. The result is fed as starting point to the NelderMead algorithm for further improvement. 3.3. Optimization performance For the assessment of the best parameter set-up of the chosen optimization algorithms, a series of optimization runs with distinct set-ups was performed. Each set-up of parameters for the optimization algorithm was run against repeated optimizations varying the seed number for the random number generator. During the tests, the objective functions was highly multimodal, e.g. it formed a great number of local maxima. Furthermore, these maxima showed a very small dierence in the value of the objective function, e.g. the solar-to-chemical conversion eciency might come up with nearly equal values despite dierent parameter vectors for the system design. Fig. 5 exemplarily outlines this behavior. As a consequence of this behavior the goal was to nd a parameter set-up for the optimization algorithm that produces the highest arithmetic mean out of a certain number of repeated optimization runs and simultaneously achieves a low spread between the lowest and highest value of the objective function. Fig. 6 depicts the optimization performance in terms of the arithmetic mean and the spread of 10 optimization runs for four dierent congurations of the genetic algorithm in stand-alone mode (denoted GA1 GA4) and three dierent conguration of the downhill simplex, each with a tighter termination tolerance specication combined with the genetic algorithm working under the conguration GA2 (denoted GA2DS1GA2DS3). The

Tower height (m) 40 120 250

Heliostat size (facet size) (m2) 10 (1) 120 (4.3) 120 (4.3)

Product of av. heliostat reectivity and av. heliostat availability 0.87 0.87 0.87

Beam error (incl. sunshape) (mrad) 3.3 3.3 3.3

Areaction Zn/ZnO (m2) 21.7 217 2170 S + SW + SE (784 + 693 + 693)

Areaction C gasif (m2) 11 110 1100 S + SW + SE (396 + 352 + 352)

Thermal power into receiver at 21.3. Solar noon with direct normal irradiation at design point of 873.33 W/m2 and an annual average of 645.17 W/m2. A multiple aperture design is introduced, consisting of three separate elds in north (N), northeast (NE) and northwest (NW) direction, to increase the optical eciency.

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Fig. 5. Comparison of two heliostat eld layouts with nearly the same solar-to-chemical conversion eciency.

0.31

total

0.30

0.29
GA1 GA2 GA3 GA4 GA2 DS1 GA2 DS2 GA2 DS3

optimization configuration

Fig. 6. Optimization performance for dierent parameter set-up for of the optimization algorithms (10 MW-ZnO).

coupling of both algorithms (GA2 vs. GA2DS2) shows a considerable performance gain (relative gain: 1.79% absolute gain: 0.53%) with respect to the arithmetic mean. The relative spread e.g. the spread related to the arithmetic mean is reduced from 3.25% to 1.38%. The assumption of a highly multimodal objective function is supported by the fact that in the Fig. 6 an increase of the NelderMead tolerance (from DS1: 1E-3 to DS3: 1E-10) has hardly any eect: the local maxima found cannot be further improved. Due to computational constrains, we limit the number of optimization runs to 10. To ensure that the results of 10 optimization runs are representative for the objective function, we chose the optimization conguration
0.31

(GA2DS2) and performed 450 optimization runs on both the zinc oxide reduction and coal gasication cases. The results of a statistical analysis are presented in Fig. 7. The 10 MW base cases give the following results: arithmetic mean: 0.30177 with standard deviation of 0.00329 for the zinc oxide reduction, and 0.40649 0.00206 for the coal gasication case. These values dier only slightly from those resulting from only 10 optimization runs (ZnO: 0.3022 0.0011; coal gasication: 0.4075 0.0021) concerning the solar-to-chemical conversion eciency. This does not hold for the partial eciencies within the solar concentration subsystem which hence will be omitted during the analysis. We observed that selecting the maximum eciency found in 10 repetitive optimization runs yields a distorted relation among comparable cases due to the impact of outliers. Hence, results are expressed in terms of the arithmetic average rather than the maximum found. 4. Results We studied conceptual applications for solar tower systems with solar reactors for the reduction of zinc oxide and for the gasication of coal. The plant is located on 36.12N geographic latitude. Three power levels were considered, dened as the intercept power on the aperture of the secondary concentrator. For comparison, a typical eld layout for a Rankine-based solar power plant was optimized using the same parameters expected for a xed solar concentration ratio of 500 suns at the design point over a cir-

a
1 SD 50%

b
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1 SD 50%

0.30
-1 SD

total

total

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-1 SD

0.29 0.400 0.28

Fig. 7. Result of 450 optimization runs performed with dierent initialization of the random number generator (left) and the descriptive statistical analysis (right) for 10 MW zinc oxide-system (a) and coal gasication-system (b).

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Table 2 Baseline case optimization for solar ZnO dissociation and coal gasication and for a constant solar concentration ratio of 500 suns (typical for Rankinebased solar power plants). Eciencies (%) Field ZnO dissociation 1 MW, 10 m2 heliostat 10 MW, 120 m2 heliostat 100 MW, three cavities 120 m2 heliostat Coal gasication 1 MW, 10 m2 heliostat 10 MW, 120 m2 heliostat 100 MW, three cavities 120 m2 heliostat Intercept Secondary Optical Reactor Total Reactor operating conditions Average operating temperature (K) 1910 1912 1920 Peak operating temperature (K) 2014 2013 2017 Flux density (MW/m2) 4.5 4.6 4.8

66.7 67.3 63.7

86.4 86.0 88.7

92.1 92.2 91.7

53.1 53.4 51.8

55.5 55.9 57.0

29.5 29.8 29.2

69.9 69.4 65.4

95.4 95.2 96.2

92.9 93.1 93.1

61.9 61.5 58.6

66.0 66.3 66.8

40.9 40.8 39.9

1308 1307 1308

1469 1470 1483

2.2 2.9 2.5

Thermal receiver 500 kW/m2 1 MW, 10 m2 heliostat 72.4 10 MW, 120 m2 heliostat 70.0 100 MW, northeld 64.5 120 m2 heliostat

96.5 97.5 99.5

69.9 68.2 64.2

n/a

cular aperture without CPC. The baseline parameters are given in Table 1. 4.1. Baseline results The results of the baseline case optimization are presented in Table 2. The eld eciency accounts for heliostat reectivity and availability, cosine losses, losses due to blocking/shading and atmospheric attenuation. The intercept eciency accounts for the spillage at the entrance aperture of the secondary concentrator. The optical eciency summarizes the previous eciencies. The denition of the reactor eciency is given in Eq. (1) and covers the losses due to radiation. The average ux density refers to aperture area of the reactor. The selected chemical process has a strong impact on the eld design and performance. The use of secondary concentrator limits the ground area where heliostats can be positioned due to its acceptance and inclination angles. The ZnO dissociation case achieves the highest solar-to-chemical energy conversion eciency at an average operating temperature of about 1900 K. The design leads to small apertures, dense solar elds, and relatively high optical losses to achieve ux densities on the reactor aperture of above 4.5 MW/m2. The coal gasication case reaches the highest solar-to-chemical eciency at average temperatures of approx. 1300 K and ux densities of around 2.5 MW/m2. This leads to lower eld losses as well as lower radiation losses of the reactor, allowing 30% more solar energy per square meter of reective surface to be stored in chemical form, as compared to the zinc oxide reduction case. These gures are theoretical upper limits; in practice the values will be considerably lower due to heat losses during start-up and shut-down, cloud passages, additional thermal losses due to convection

and conduction heat transfer, and the use of purge gases. In addition, incomplete reactions and the generation of by-products will further reduce the chemical yield and consequently the energy conversion eciency. Scaling up from 1 to 100 MW leads to relatively small drops in the optical eciency of about 23% points. The relative comparison is also inuenced by the tower height that was xed and not used as an optimization parameter. In the 1 MW case, 120 m2 heliostats cannot be used eciently as they generate excessive spillage, therefore 10 m2 heliostats have been considered. For 10 MW and 100 MW cases, only 120 m2 heliostats were considered as the impact of spillage is signicantly smaller and a very large number of small 10 m2 heliostats is expected to increase the operation and maintenance eort. 4.2. Sensitivity analysis A sensitivity analysis is carried out for the heliostat beam quality, the tower height, and the reactor radius on an interval of 30% around the baseline value. The results are shown in Fig. 8af in terms of the change of the solarto-chemical energy conversion eciency, the optical eciency, and the ux density. The heliostat beam quality was varied from 4.3 to 2.3 mrad. As the sunshape (2.24 mrad) is already included in this gure, a 2.3 mrad beam quality represents a theoretical perfect heliostat. Heliostats with excellent optical qualities would be represented by a beam error of around 2.7 mrad. Both applications benet strongly by the increased heliostat beam quality: the share of the gain in total eciency compared to the gain in beam quality is about 64% on average in case of the zinc oxide reduction system and about 22% in case of the coal gasication-system. Both applications

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1200

Fig. 8. (af) Sensitivity analysis of solar-to-chemical energy conversion eciency for the 1 MW concept for zinc oxide dissociation (ac), and coal gasication (df). Parameters are the heliostat beam quality (a and d), tower height (b and e) and reactive surface.

show the same relative increase in the estimated solar ux density on the reactor aperture. The contribution of the receiver eciency gain to the total eciency gain is by 32% (zinc oxide) and 40% (coal gasication) larger than the contribution of the gain in the optical eciency. Concerning the tower height, both applications suer to a greater extent from a reduction than the gain from an increase. The loss in the overall eciency is by a factor of 2.0 for zinc oxide reduction case and 2.4 for the coal gasication. In the zinc oxide reduction case, both optical and receiver eciency contributes equally to the overall eciency change. In the coal gasication case, the contribution of the change in the optical eciency exceeds the

contribution of the receiver eciency by 56%. An increase in the available reactive surface and, consequently, on the reaction rate, results in the same chemical conversion rate but at a lower temperature, leading to smaller radiation losses and hence to higher reactor eciencies. Therefore, the overall eciency is mainly inuenced by the reactor eciency: the change in the reactor eciency is on average a factor of 2.7 and 2.4 larger than the change in the optical eciency for the zinc oxide reduction and coal gasication cases, respectively. Thus, accurate kinetic data are critical to identify the optimized eld and reactor design. The impact of the inlet temperature and hence of heat recovery to a certain degree is shown in Fig. 9. Note that

Temperature [K]

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/
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ref

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ref

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total

total

0.30

1925

0.45

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0.25 400 600 800 1000 Inlet Temperature [K] 1200

1900

0.40 200

1300 400 600 800 Inlet Temperature [K] 1000

Fig. 9. Impact of reactor inlet temperature: (a) zinc oxide reduction; (b) coal gasication.

the range of the inlet temperatures shown here exceeds the reachable values by heat recovery from the products and serves the purpose of clarifying upper bounds of the applications. By increasing the inlet temperature of reactants from 298 K to 1273 K, a gain in the solar-to-chemical eciency from 4% points (zinc oxide reduction) to 7% points (coal gasication) is observed. In the case of zinc oxide reduction, quenching of the product gases is required to avoid recombination, so that an ecient heat recovery might not be possible unless products are separated at high temperatures, e.g. using semi-permeable ceramic membranes. In the case of coal gasication, a heat recovery would increase the performance and is therefore worthwhile to consider. 5. Summary and conclusion We presented a methodology for the optimization of main design parameters of solar tower systems for performing high-temperature solar thermochemical processes. The optimization is based on maximizing the solar-tochemical energy conversion eciency and accounts for the thermodynamics and kinetics of the reaction applied. A detailed investigation on the optimization problem showed a highly multimodal objective function that makes it dicult to identify the global optimum with a reasonable eort. We have therefore chosen a statistical approach to identify a reasonably good local optimum for our analysis. We carried out optimizations on two exemplarily thermochemical processes subject to current research: the zinc oxide reduction and the coal gasication. Both processes are modeled as ideal reactors for determining the theoretical maximum eciency of storing solar energy in chemical form. Our results indicate that such a system is best designed for a solar ux density of 4600 suns operating at 1900 K for the zinc oxide reduction, and of 2500 suns at 1300 K for the coal gasication. The solar-to-chemical energy conversion eciencies are estimated to be 30% and 40% for zinc oxide reduction and coal gasication, respectively. In that regard, we compared the resulting optical eciencies of several system designs with that of

the xed ux density system (of 500 suns) usually applied in Rankine-based applications. Due to the higher concentration levels of the chemical applications, penalties of 15% points (zinc oxide reduction) and 7% points (coal gasication) are obtained. A sensitivity analysis on the optical design parameters shows that the zinc oxide reduction case benets to a greater extend from an increase of the optical performance than the coal gasication case. Further, the benet from an increase in inlet temperature, e.g. by measures of heat recovery, is on average 0.3% and 0.7% points per 100 K for the zinc oxide reduction and coal gasication, respectively. Acknowledgements This work was performed during the sabbatical stay of Prof. Robert Pitz-Paal at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering of ETH Zurich in summer 2008.

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