The influence of the cooling system fouling on the thermal performance of a CSP plant: Recent research updated

Concentrating solar power (CSP) plants make use of the renewable and inexhaustible solar energy to produce electricity. Limited by the scarce water resources, CSP plants built in arid areas choose Natural Draft Dry Cooling Tower (NDDCT) to remove waste heat. However, NDDCT suffers from low efficiency in hot summer days. To resolve this problem, inlet air spray-cooling is introduced to improve the performance of NDDCT. The single most influential factor that limits those cooling systems process performance in long-term operation is fouling. This mini-review reviewed the currently available papers on fouling studies and summarized the research trends from the conclusions highlighted by researches. In the first part of this paper, the research progress focused on the studies on NDDCT and how the hybrid(wet/dry) cooling could improve the CSP plants performance. In the second part, the fouling impact on cooling tower is presented, including experimental, characterization and model studies. The water velocity, the temperature, the heated tube materials and the geometry of the heated surfaces are the dominant parameters that effect fouling mechanism. Further requirements are identified in this paper in order to develop a reliable understanding of fouling effect on the application of cooling towers.