Analysis of a helical coil once-through molten salt steam generator

A molten salt helical coil steam generator is an alternative to kettle- or drum-type evaporators which are currently used in commercial-scale solar thermal power plants. A 300 kW prototype was tested during the OPTS project at ENEA. The experimental results presented in this paper have been used to validate a detailed heat transfer analysis of the whole system. The heat transfer analysis deals with the study of both the overall heat transfer coefficient and the shell-side heat transfer coefficient. Due to the specific features of this type of system, no correlations were available in the literature. A new numerical model to predict the performance of large-scale systems is also presented.