Solar towers

Sun tower (also known as “Central Tower” or “Heliostat tower”) is a type of solar furnace using a tower to receive the focused sunlight. It uses an array of flat, movable mirrors to focus the sun’s rays upon a collector tower. Before we continue, we should say that solar furnace is a structure used to harness the rays of the sun in order to produce usually very high temperatures, for industry needs.

Early designs used focused sun’s rays to heat water, and used the resulting steam to power a turbine.

However, designs using liquid sodium in place of water have been demonstrated, which results in storing the energy before using it to boil water to drive turbine. These modern designs allow power to be generated when the sun is not shining.

If we speak about modern design of sun towers, we can say that today many solar power towers are being air-cooled instead of water-cooled ones, to preserve the much needed water; flat glass is used instead of original curved glass, which is more expensive; some of them store the heat in molten salt containers to continue producing electricity while the sun is not shining.

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in solar tower power technology, as it’s evident from the fact that there are several companies involving in planning, designing and building utility size sun towers. This is an important step towards the ultimate goal of developing commercially viable plants.