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🌬️ Solar Chimney: Solar Updraft Tower Power Generation

Explore how a solar chimney power plant turns sunlight into electricity by combining a giant greenhouse collector with a tall chimney's buoyant stack effect. Simulate collector area, chimney height, and turbine output based on the real Manzanares, Spain prototype.

Engineering & Materials3DModerate60 FPS💧 Water

The simulator demonstrates how a solar chimney power plant's updraft velocity and electrical output depend calculably on two independent design variables: the collector's total area, which determines how much air mass is heated per second, and the chimney's height, which determines how much buoyant driving pressure that temperature difference can generate. It models the greenhouse heating of the collector, the stack-effect pressure buildup inside the tower, and the resulting turbine power output, calibrated against real measurements from the Manzanares, Spain prototype.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Adjust the collector area slider to change how much ground is covered by the greenhouse canopy, and adjust the chimney height slider to change the tower's height. Watch how each change independently affects the predicted air temperature rise, updraft velocity inside the chimney, and the estimated electrical power generated by the turbines, and compare your settings against the real Manzanares prototype's dimensions and measured output.

💡 Did You Know?

Did you know the Manzanares prototype's chimney was only about 10 meters in diameter but nearly 195 meters tall, roughly the height of a 60-story building, and it ran largely unattended generating up to 50 kilowatts for about seven years before being decommissioned, proving the stack-effect physics that all later, larger solar chimney designs are based on.

⚙ Under the hood

renewable energysolar powerthermodynamicsbuoyancyfluid dynamicspower generationgreenhouse effectengineering

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install