Design, construction and performance eva‎luation of parabolic trough solar collector with absorber cavity

10/12/2023 12:00:00 AM

Nowadays, all developed countries are looking for a solution to prevent environmental pollution and use clean energy. The sun is widely used among renewable energies. In order to use solar energy, heat-exchangers are needed to transfer the sun's thermal energy to the operating fluid, which are known as solar collectors. Improving the efficiency of the collector and making maximum use of the available power is one of the main goals of research in this field. The originality and low cost of parabolic trough solar collectors (PTSC) compared to other concentrator collectors has caused this type of collector to be used in this study with the aim of improving its efficiency. Adding an absorber cavity to the parabolic trough collector (PTC) in order to concentrate more solar heat on the absorber tube and also changing the type of absorber tube from single-tube to three-tubes to heat a more volume of fluid in one working cycle and use Silicon-dioxide nanofluid with water in different volume fractions (0.1, 0.5 and 1) in order to increase the efficiency of the collector was among the ideas in this study. In order to reduce costs and implement many innovations on the collector, the solar collector is designed in laboratory dimensions (small scale) so that the results obtained for the collector with larger dimensions can be predicted and the ability to implement innovations on it can be done more reliably. The energy equations governing the collector and its thermodynamic modeling have been implemented in MATLAB software. After optimizing the parabolic collector, the dimensions of the collector have been chosen according to the market availability, close to its optimal dimensions, and its construction has been done with these dimensions. The results in the experiment were compared with its exact values (MATLAB code) and the errors in it were obtained for all the experiments. The obtained results show that the use of absorbent cavities and three-tube type absorbent tubes has increased the temperature by 38% and useful heat gained by the fluid by 230% after one hour of work. Also, using dimensionless numbers, the final temperature of the fluid and its useful heat have been obtained for collectors with higher dimensions, and it has been suggested to other researchers to use it in future research.

كلكتور خورشيدي سهموي , حفره جاذب , لوله جاذب , نانوسيال , عملكرد حرارتي

Parabolic solar collector , Absorber cavity , Absorber tube , Nanofluid , Thermal performance

Farshid Behrou

Seyyed Mustafa Hosseinalipour