The increasing demand for renewable energy has promoted interest in using solar chimney power plants for generating electricity. Due to the large construction and maintenance requirements, solar chimney power plants have a high power generation cost. It is essential to improve the efficiency of solar chimney power plants to make it an affordable means of clean energy. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of a diffuser at the chimney inlet on performance of the power plant using computational fluid dynamics. The solar chimney system was modeled with the ground as an energy storage medium and was inspired the power plant in Manzanares, Spain. Different diffuser geometries were tested for the same chimney height by varying the ratio of diffuser inlet-to-outlet radii and diffuser height. The results indicated that the updraft velocity increased and the power plant energy output increased by 26% for a diffuser with optimized parameters.
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