Energy sustainability is a growingly important research topic, and solar energy is a major form of renewable energy. To better receive energy from the sun, solid particles can be used because they are a better absorber for the radiation energy than the working fluid in solar receivers. After absorbing the radiation energy, the particles can conductively transfer their heat to the working fluid. While promising, this new technique has posed great challenges to studying radiatively heated particle interacting with ambient turbulent air flows with heat transfer. We perform basics research motivated by particle solar receiver application by investigating the radiation effects on heat transport efficiency in particle-laden Rayleigh–Bénard (RB) convection with different particle properties, and we have been studying radiatively heated particles settling in RB convection recently.
