In order to demonstrate how the collector roof inclination can change the performance of the system, a parametric study is employed using CFD. To evaluate the flow and heat transfer of the system, the geometric parameters of the Manzanares power plant are modeled. The ground thickness in the computational domain is considered to be 5 m. The bottom of the ground and ambient temperature are set as 300 K. Glass as a semi-transparent zone with convection and solar irradiation are modeled as the boundary condition of the roof of the collector. The solar irradiation which enters through the collector roof into the computational domain is set to 850 W/m2. In addition, the chimney is considered as an adiabatic wall. For the collector inlet and chimney outlet, the pressure inlet and pressure outlet boundary conditions are each set. To simulate the turbine, the pressure jump across the turbine section is modeled. The pressure-based solver with the coupled algorithm is selected as the pressure–velocity coupling scheme, and the body-force-weighted algorithm is used as the spatial discretization method for pressure. 3D structured grids were adopted inside the computational domain with refined grids near the walls. Scalable wall functions with y∗ > 30 were used to simulate the near-wall treatment of the turbulent flow. This was done to prevent the deterioration of the standard wall functions under grid refinement. Three mesh sizes are considered in order to obtain an accurate solution which is grid independent, comparing the average velocity and temperature of the airflow at the base of the chimney. For the coarse mesh, the velocity and temperature are 7.5% and 9% larger than for the fine mesh, respectively. For the intermediate mesh, the difference with the fine mesh is about 0.86% for the velocity and 1.4% for the temperature. Therefore, with respect to the mesh size, the fine mesh is near the insensitivity of solution accuracy. The ranges of hexahedral cell sizes for the fine mesh in the direction of flow are between 0.05 m and 0.7 m. Commercial CFD code ANSYS FLUENT 13 was employed to solve the above-mentioned equations.