One of STERG’s students, Christoff van Niekerk, will be presenting some of his master’s research at a webinar held by QFinsoft. This forms part of his work investigating the design and performance evaluation of a natural draft dry cooling system for a supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) CSP power plant.
The sCO₂ Brayton power cycle is a promising alternative to conventional steam Rankine cycles, offering high thermal efficiency and potentially lower capital costs. Accurate modelling of individual components, such as the cooling system, is essential during early-stage research to identify key design considerations and ensure robust, resilient system performance.
The webinar specially aims to showcase how employing a coupled simulation methodology can help improve the modelling accuracy of complex cooling technologies. This approach addresses traditional short comings with detailed modelling of both the air-side and process-side of the cooling system. For this application, the sCO2 process-side requires a discretised heat exchanger network to accurately account for the variation of the thermophysical properties of the fluid. By linking this model to a high-fidelity three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model of the air-side of the cooling system, the complex interplay that exists between the interacting fluid streams can be investigated. The coupled model thereby enables the assessment of system performance under both no-wind and windy conditions, providing information on potential maldistribution, local flow effects and overall cooling system performance.
Event details:
Title: Coupled simulation of a natural draft dry cooling system for an sCO2 power plant
Date: 20 November 2025 | 12:00-13:00
Register here: https://lnkd.in/dxMiR2MH