RS–DFID Africa capacity-building initiative programme grant: harnessing unsteady phase-change heat exchange in high-performance concentrated solar power systems

The Royal Society and UK Department for International Development supported a consortium of three universities across sub-Saharan Africa and Imperial College London with the aim of developing new knowledge on direct-steam-generation concentrated solar power (CSP) plants and supporting relevant capacity building across the Universities of Lagos, Mauritius and Pretoria. Key research findings from the programme include an improved flow-classification scheme for two-phase, liquid-liquid flows; testing of advanced surfaces with much-improved steady-state heat transfer performance-the commercial nanoFLUX surface showed up to 200% higher heat-transfer coefficients (HTCs) in pool boiling compared with other surfaces with R-134a/R-245fa; first-of-a-kind measurements of transient flow boiling HTCs, which were up to 30% lower in step perturbations than quasi-steady-state expectations in horizontal pipes with R-245fa; error estimation and corrections for laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) measurements, leading to the development of an adapted planar LIF technique with uncertainty <10% for local, instantaneous film thickness measurements in annular flows, and the application of such diagnostic methods to pool, falling-film and flow boiling in pipes; and predictions of an ~80% increase in the net present value of a case-study CSP plant when integrated with solid storage media.