Hey guys, I haven't found a better place to post this and none of the books/articles used have managed to successfully answer my question, so I'm giving reddit a go. Here's the gist of it:

My final course assignment is about concentrated solar power on an organic rankine cycle. I'm using fresnel reflectors to directly heat my heat exchanger, but I'm having some issues on understanding a few concepts.

Initially considering a raw system efficiency of ~20%, the idea is to get ~30kW at the turbine, which means a solar input of ~150kW at the exchanger. What I don't fully understand is how I equate that into mirror area using a concentration factor.

From what I've gathered, the concentration factor C is simply the ratio between the mirror area and the exchanger area and, for fresnel reflectors, that can go from 20~100. However, I'm not sure if that's correct and how exactly does it work. For example, can I just assume a C = 50 and that'll hold true as long as my area ratios are 50?

Then to find my heat input, I've used: Q = DNI * C * Area_mirror, but with DNI = 1kW/m² and C = 50 it can't mean that I only need 3m² of mirror to get all this power, can it?

And how would that heat flux translate to my exchanger? Does it need to have .06 m² to maintain the concentration ratio? And would the heat flux then by 150kW/.06m² = 2.5MW/m²? That's unbelievably high and I doubt the analysis is correct.

Is anyone able to shed some light into this or point me to somewhere I can get that info reliably? Thanks!