Surface Wind Pressure Distribution of Molten-Salt Power Tower by CFD Analysis

Molten-salt towers can help society archive the sustainable development goals and allow more older, dirtier fossil fuel plants to retire. The distribution of surface wind pressure on molten-salt power should be carefully considered to provide a guidance to structural designers. In this paper, the numerical wind tunnel simulation of the molten-salt power tower was performed by using CFD technology. The accuracy of the application of CFD technology is verified based on the CAARC standard high-rise building model. The parameters considered in the validation analysis are computational domain size, mesh generation method, turbulence model, and boundary conditions. Then CFD analysis was performed to investigate the wind velocity, streamline, and pressure distribution of the molten-salt tower. In addition, the average wind pressure coefficients of the tower under various basic wind pressures and geometric sizes of the receivers are discussed. It indicted variations in the basic wind pressures and the receiver diameters have a clear effect on the mutations of the average coefficients on the vertical and horizontal lines, while the changes of the receiver heights have little influence.