Concentrated Solar Power Technology and Thermal Energy Storage: A brief Overview of Nascent Sustainable Designs

Concentrated solar power (CSP) is mainly encouraged to harness the solar energy for producing electricity. The CSP technologies are highly dependent on the efficient reflector and receiver designs, working medium and thermal storage technologies to produce intermittent electrical power with several options like hybrid, peak load operations, co-generation, etcetera. The receivers have smaller aperture areas such that they operate under higher concentration ratios to produce high temperature at the focus. Construction materials of receiver and heat transfer mediums are vital to extracting more solar energy from the mirror fields or parabolic collectors. Phase change materials (PCM) are found to have numerous applications in the energy collection and storage systems. This article provides the recent developments in the concentrated solar receivers and the future direction in the receiver technology.