Power Plant: electricity

Solar Cells


Solar Cell used in Skylab

Though it sounds unusual at first, it is a fact that solar cells represent a very important part of information technology revolution in the last few decades. Without solar cells there wouldn't be so many communication satellites, which found the information technology revolution. The consequences are fast development in the field of information technologies and computer sciences, Internet etc. Data and voice transfer possibilities, which are offered to you by modern communications techniques, were made possible by a small piece of silicon in the form of a solar cell.

First solar cells

A physical phenomenon allowing light-electricity conversion - photovoltaic effect, was discovered in 1839 by the French physicist Alexandre Edmond Becquerel. Experimenting with metal electrodes and electrolyte he discovered that conductance rises with illumination.

Willoughby Smith discovered photovoltaic effect in selenium in 1873. In 1876, with his student R. E. Day, William G. Adams discovered that illuminating a junction between selenium and platinum also has a photovoltaic effect. These two discoveries were a foundation for the first selenium solar cell construction, which was built in 1877. Charles Fritts first described them in detail in 1883.

In 1918, a Polish scientist Jan Czochralski discovered a method for monocrystalline silicon production, which enabled monocrystalline solar cells production. The first silicon monocrystalline solar cell was constructed in 1941.

The photovoltaic effect in other materials was observed in 1932 in cadmium-selenide (CdS). Nowadays, CdS belongs among important materials for solar cells production.

In 1963, Sharp Corporation developed the first usable photovoltaic module from silicon solar cells. The biggest photovoltaic system at the time, the 242 W module field was set up in Japan. A year later, in 1964, Americans applied a 470 W photovoltaic field in the Nimbus space project.

Photovoltaics (PV)

The term photovoltaics derives from the Greek word "phos" meaning light and the word "volt" (named by Alessandro Volta). Photovoltaics is a science, which examines light-electricity conversion, respectively, photon energy-electric current conversion. In other words it stands for light-current conversion. Both direct and diffuse solar radiation take part of the process. The light to current conversion takes place within solar cells, which can be amorphous, poly- crystalline or single-crystal, according to their structure.

Single-crystal cells are made in long cylinders and sliced into round or hexagonal wafers. While this process is energy-intensive and wasteful of materials, it produces the highest-efficiency solar cells—as high as 25 percent in some laboratory tests. Because these high-efficiency solar cells are more expensive, they are sometimes used in combination with concentrators such as mirrors or lenses. Concentrating systems can boost efficiency to almost 30 percent. Single-crystal accounts for 29 percent of the global market for PV.
Polycrystalline cells are made of molten silicon cast into ingots or drawn into sheets, then sliced into squares. While production costs are lower, the efficiency of the solar cells is lower too—around 15 percent. Because the solar cells are square, they can be packed more closely together. Polycrystalline solar cells make up 62 percent of the global PV market.
Amorphous silicon (a-Si) is a radically different approach. Silicon is essentially sprayed onto a glass or metal surface in thin films, making the whole module in one step. This approach is by far the least expensive, but it results in very low efficiencies—only about five percent.

Photovoltaic Cells

The basic PV or solar cell typically produces only a small amount of power. To produce more power, solar cells (about 40) can be interconnected to form panels or modules. PV modules range in output from 10 to 300 watts. If more power is needed, several modules can be installed on a building or at ground-level in a rack to form a PV array. About 10–20 PV arrays can provide enough power for a household.

Application Example

Most common application of solar cells applies to pocket calculators power supply, parking meters power supply and similar appliances. Solar-module consists of many solar cells, which are electrically connected and placed between glass and tedlar plate, and framed by an (usualy) aluminium frame. A number of solar-modules and other components (batteries, charge regulators, and inverters) can form large photovoltaic systems.

The first PV system applications developed were applied as an energy source for satellites and later for orbital stations in space. Nowadays, photovoltaic systems are applied as an energy source in many cases. Most commonly applied photovoltaic systems can be found in remote and rural areas where no public grid is available. However, quite often grid-connected systems are constructed in urban areas.

Photovoltaic systems are an excellent solution to electricity production regardless of your whereabouts - even at high latitudes of Himalayas or in Antarctica photovoltaic systems have been build. According to loads connected to the system and to the basic design principles, the following photovoltaic systems are used - direct coupled photovoltaic systems (systems without batteries - water pumping systems for example), standalone photovoltaic systems, grid-connected photovoltaic systems, hybrid systems (e.g. PV - wind or PV - diesel systems), concentrator photovoltaic systems. The applications below depict use of photovoltaic systems as an energy source in many interesting ways.

Photovoltaic Power Plants

Photovoltaic power plants - Solar modules are nowadays parts of large standalone or grid-connected systems. Large photovoltaic power plants (MW range) have beeing constructed in Germany, Spain, USA, Italy, Netherlands etc. Worldwide more than 250 large PV power plants with peak power 1 MWp or more (each plant) are connected to the public grid(s).

Building Integrated Photovoltaics

Building integrated photovoltaics - Acronym of BIPV (Building Integrated Photovoltaics) refers to photovoltaic systems integrated with an object's building phase. It means that they are built/constructed along with an object. They are also planned together with the object. Yet, they could be built later on. Due to specific task cooperation of many different experts, such as architects, civil engineers and PV system designers, is necessary.

Photovoltaic Noise Barrier

Noise barriers - An efficient way of noise prevention by application of photovoltaic modules was first demonstrated in Switzerland in 1989. Later, the solution was applied also in some other European countries. Noise prevention is also a research subject of several projects conducted in European Union. Different photovoltaic noise barriers can be built considering motorway features, barrier construction, the height of the barrier, and other factor influence (environment etc.).

Reference Books:


Solar Electricity Handbook, 2010 Edition

Photovoltaics: Design and Installation Manual

Practical Handbook of Photovoltaics

Boiler

A power plant boiler is a device for converting the chemical energy in coal into heat energy and then transferring that heat energy to a fluid, steam. The efficiency of a coal-fired power plant increases as the pressure and temperature of the steam increases. This has led to a demand for higher temperatures and pressures as technology has developed and this has required, in turn, the development of materials with higher performance under increasingly stressful conditions. The most advanced boilers develop steam with a pressure of around 250bar and a temperature of 600°C.

Early boilers were made from iron, but as the demands on the system increased, special steels were used that could resist the conditions encountered in the power plant. These now dominate in modern boilers. Even so, oxygen dissolved in the water circulating within the boiler pipes can cause serious corrosion in steel at the elevated temperatures and pressures to which it is exposed, so the boiler water must be deoxygenated.

The first part of the boiler is a furnace in which combustion takes place. In the most common type of boiler, pulverised coal is injected with a stream of air into the furnace in a continuous process through a device known as a burner. The coal burns, producing primarily carbon dioxide while incombustible mineral material (ash) falls to the bottom of the furnace where it can be removed (some is also carried away by the hot combustion gases).

The heat generated during combustion (the temperature at the heart of the furnace may be as high as 1500°C) is partly radiant and partly convective, the latter carried off by the hot combustion gases. The radiant heat is collected at the walls of the furnace where water is circulated in pipes. Covective heat in the combustion gases is captured in bundles of tubes containing either water or steam which are placed in the path of the flue gas as it exits the furnace.

In a conventional boiler there is a drum positioned appropriately within the steam–water system containing both water and steam so that steam can develop as the temperature of the fluid rises. The most advanced designs, however, operate at such high temperatures and pressures that they do not pass through a stage in which water and steam co-exist. In these boilers the water turns directly to steam within the water tubes. This type of boiler exploits what is called a supercritical cycle, called so because the thermodynamic fluid (the water) enters what is known as the supercritical phase without passing through a condition in which both water and steam co-exist.

The boiler watertubes in the exhaust gas path are frequently divided into a number of different sections. (These sections have names, such as economiser, reheater or superheater.) The water or steam passes through them is a specific order determined by the design of the steam cycle. Traditional pulverised-coal boilers have been built with outputs of up to 1000MW.

Steam turbine

The steam turbine is the primary mechanical device in most conventional coal-fired power stations. Its job is to convert the heat energy contained in the steam exiting the boiler into mechanical energy, rotary motion. The steam turbine first appeared in power applications at the end of the nineteenth century. Before that steam power was derived from steam-driven piston engines.

The steam turbine is something of a cross between a hydropower turbine and a windmill. It, like them, is designed to extract energy from a moving fluid. The fluid is water, the same as the hydro turbine. In the case of a hydro turbine the water remains in the liquid phase and neither its volume nor its temperature changes during energy extraction. In the case of the steam turbine, energy extraction is from a gas, steam, rather than a liquid and involves both the pressure and the temperature of the fluid falling. This has a profound effect on the turbine design.

Both hydro and steam turbines exist in two broad types: there are impulse turbines which extract the energy from a fast-moving jet of fluid and reaction turbines which are designed to exploit the pressure of a fluid rather than its motion. A hydro turbine will be of one design or the other. In a steam turbine the two principles may be mixed in a single machine and they may even be mixed in a single turbine blade.

It is impossible to extract all the energy from steam using a turbine with a single set of turbine blades. Instead, a steam turbine utilises a series of sets of blades, called stages. Each stage is followed by a set of stationary blades (usually called nozzles) which control the steam flow to the next stage.

A single steam turbine stage consists of a set of narrow blades projecting from a central hub. (In concept, it is something like a steam windmill.) Ten or more sets of blades can be mounted on a single steam turbine shaft. This combination of shaft and blades is called a rotor. The turbine stages are separated by carefully designed stationary blades, or nozzles, which control the flow of steam from one set of rotating blades to the next. The precise shape of the blades in each set determines whether that set is impulse or reaction, or a cross between the two. The hub, blades and nozzles are enclosed in a close-fitting case to maintain the steam pressure.

In a steam turbine impulse stage, energy is extracted at constant pressure while the velocity of the steam falls as it flows across the blades. The steam is then expanded through a stationary control stage to increase its velocity again before energy is extracted from another set of impulse blades. In a steam turbine reaction stage, by contrast, both pressure and velocity of the steam fall as energy is extracted by the rotating blades.

Steam exiting the power plant boiler is at a high temperature and a high pressure. Both temperature and pressure fall as the steam passes through the turbine. The greater the temperature drop and the greater the pressure drop, the more energy can be captured from the steam. Consequently the most efficient power plants condense the steam back to water at the end of the turbine.

Even with a modern design it is impossible to capture all the energy from the steam efficiently with a single multiple-stage turbine. Coal-fired power plants use several. These are usually divided into high-, medium- and low-pressure turbines. The blades in these turbines get larger (longer) as the pressure drops; in fact, the low-pressure turbine may comprise several turbines operating in parallel to gain the most energy without making a single turbine impossibly large. All the turbines may be mounted on a single shaft, but it is common for the low-pressure turbines to be on a separate shaft rotating at a lower speed to reduce the forces exerted at the blade tips. Multiple turbines of this type can have aggregate outputs of over 1000MW.

As with boilers, the demands of modern power plant design have led to the development and introduction of high-performance materials that can cope with the extreme conditions encountered within a steam turbine. The high-pressure turbine blades have to be able to withstand extremes of both temperature and pressure and have to be able to resist the abrasive force of steam. At the low-pressure end of the turbine train the large size of the turbines means that the blade tip speeds are enormous, again requiring specially designed materials to withstand the centrifugal forces exerted on them.

A refinement which improves the overall efficiency is to return the steam to the boiler after it has passed through the high-pressure turbine, reheating it before delivering it to the medium-pressure turbine. Most modern steam turbine plants use this single reheat design (multiple reheat is also possible).

The theoretical maximum efficiency of a coal-fired power station is determined by the temperature difference between the steam entering the high-pressure turbine and the steam exiting the low-pressure turbine. The greater this temperature difference, the more energy can be extracted. With the most advanced technology, utilising the best boiler materials to achieve the highest-steam temperatures and pressures, a maximum efficiency of around 43–45% can be achieved. New supercritical designs may eventually push this as high as 55%. In the near future, however, the best that is likely to be achieved is something between 47% and 49%.

Generators

The turbine shaft, or shafts if there is more than one, are coupled to a generator which converts the rotary mechanical motion into the electrical energy that the plant is designed to provide. Generators, like steam turbines, first appeared during the nineteenth century. All utilise a coil of a conducting material, usually copper moving in a magnetic field to generate electricity.

The generators used in most power stations, including coal-fired power stations, are designed to deliver an alternating current (AC) to a power grid. An AC current is preferred because it allows the voltage to be raised or lowered easily using a transformer. For transmission of power over long distances it is preferable to use a very high voltage and a low current. The voltage is then reduced with a transformer before delivery to the consumer.

The need to generate an AC voltage determines the speed at which the generator rotates. This must be an exact multiple of the grid frequency (normally grids operate at either 50 or 60Hz). For grids operating at 50Hz the traditional generator speed is 50 cycles per second, or 3000rpm. The equivalent 60Hz machine rotates at 3600rpm. This speed, in turn, determines the operating speed of the steam turbine. Large low-pressure steam turbines may operate at half these speeds.

Generators may be as large as 2000MW, and large generators are normally built to suit a particular project. Modern generators operate with an efficiency of greater than 95%. The remaining 5% of the mechanical input energy from the turbine is usually lost as heat within the generator windings and magnetic components. Even though the percentage is small, this still represents an enormous amount of energy; perhaps 50MW in a 1000-MW machine. Hence generators require very efficient cooling systems in order to prevent them overheating. Avariety of cooling mediums are used, including hydrogen which is extremely efficient because of its low density and high specific heat.

The broad outline of generator design has changed little over a century. However new materials have improved efficiencies. The latest developments involve the use of superconducting materials to reduce energy and increase efficiencies.