2. Modeling of reactor for solar hydrogen production
2.1 Physical model and design of solar thermo-chemical reactor
The solar reactor consists of multiphase zone, sintered alumina solid zone and an insulation solid zone as
shown in Fig 1. The length of the cavity of the reactor is 230 mm while the cavity diameter is 160 mm.
Argon quench gas is injected into the cavity through six jets placed symmetrically around the cavity. The
wall of the cavity is made up of 2 mm thick ZnO tiles. The cavity wall is surrounded by a layer of sintered
alumina of thickness 4mm which act as thermal shock absorber and to some extent as thermal insulator.
The next insulation layer made up of 110 mm thick alumina fibers surrounds the sintered alumina layer.
In order to prevent hot gases escaping from reactor cavity through the aperture and to reduce re-radiation
losses, a 3 mm thick quartz window is mounted on a water-cooled aluminum ring and integrated to the
front face of cavity via conical frustum. Concentrated solar radiation from the parabolic dish at flux
intensity of about 5000 suns enters the cavity through quartz window. The reactor has a dynamic feeder
that extends and retracts within the cavity and enables to evenly spread out a layer of ZnO particles of
desired thickness along the entire cavity.