Impacts of thermal aging and associated heat losses on the performance of a Pyromark 2500-coated concentrated solar power central receiver

Abstract

Pyromark 2500 is a widely used coating for concentrated solar power central receiver systems due to its high absorptivity, ease in application, and relatively low cost. Pyromark's performance is quantified by its figure of merit (FOM), which relates the coating's heat losses to its solar-to-thermal conversion efficiency. After long-term exposure to high temperatures (>750{\deg}C) and irradiance levels, Pyromark's absorptivity and FOM decrease. The aim of this research is to evaluate changes in Pyromark's absorptivity, heat losses, and FOM as a function of thermal aging. This work also compares the most common FOM expression, which neglects convection losses, to an FOM that includes all heat losses experienced by a central receiver. Isothermal aging experiments are conducted on Pyromark-coated Inconel 600 substrates at 750{\deg}C. The spectral, hemispherical absorptivity of the samples is measured at room temperature with a spectrophotometer and input into a finite element analysis model that includes radiation and convection boundary conditions. The heat flux and temperature output by the model are used to determine the heat losses and FOM of the Pyromark samples. After 151 h of thermal aging, the sample with the thinnest Pyromark coat maintains the most stable total, hemispherical absorptivity. Conversely, the total, hemispherical absorptivity of the sample with the thickest Pyromark coat drops by a maximum of 1.73%, and the corresponding maximum drop in FOM is 1.90% when windy conditions (which are expected around central receivers) are assumed. In windy conditions, convection losses constitute between 21% and 24% of the samples' total heat loss; thus, the most common FOM expression in the literature overestimates the samples' FOM by ~4.40%. An analysis of the samples' heat losses indicates that reflection losses exceed emission losses when the absorptivity declines significantly.