Preliminary discrete element modeling of a falling particle curtain for CSP central tower receivers

Current methods used to simulate the curtain thickness in a falling particle receiver lead to a poor agreement with the experiments. Here the Discrete Element Method (DEM) is proposed to address the problem, including both the top hopper and the interactions between particles in the model. Some first promising results are presented, showing an acceptable agreement between simulation and experiment for an ad-hoc set of input parameters. A sensitivity study provides a first assessment of the effects of the main input parameters of the model (boundary conditions at the release, particle Young's modulus, restitution coefficients and effective particle diameter) on the predicted curtain thicknes