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Among all types of concentrators, compound parabolic concentrators (CPCs) have been designed as stationary solar collectors for relative high temperature operations with high cost effectiveness. The CPCs are potentially the favorable option for solar power systems and high temperature solar thermal system. This paper provided a review on studies of CPCs in solar thermal applications. It covered basic concepts, principles, and design of CPCs. It also reviewed optical models and thermal models of CPCs, as well as the thermal applications of CPCs. The challenges were also summarized.

The Smith’s method is stipulated by the International Association of Classification Societies in the Common Structure Rules as a standard method for estimating ultimate/residual strength of hull girder in both intact and damaged conditions. However, for the latter case where the effective hull cross-section is asymmetric and the neutral axis of damaged cross-section not only translates but also rotates, the additional force vector equilibrium also needs to be applied so as to determine the neutral axis plane. The commonly adopted iterative methods for the two-force-equilibrium problem do not always converge for the desired accuracy. This paper proposes a Particle Swarm Optimization based iteration method to trace the motion of the neutral axis plane of asymmetric cross sections. The translation and rotation of the neutral axis are taken as the two dimensions of particles in the model, and the force equilibrium error and the force vector equilibrium error are the objective functions. The neutral axis is determined by performing a random search within the entire range of possible position of neutral axis. The proposed method has been implemented and validated for the case of the DOW’s 1/3 frigate model, the analysis of efficiency and accuracy shows that the method performs in general better than traditional ones.

Due to the mounting concerns about climate changes and depletion of fossil fuels, solar energy, as one type of renewable energy, has attracted a lot of interests from academia, industries, and government in the past few decades. Currently, solar thermal technologies have been applied to the applications at the low operating temperature below 100°C by using flat-plate solar collectors and at the high operating temperature above 250°C by using solar tracking concentrators. For the medium operating temperatures between 100°C and 250°C, flat-plate solar collectors can hardly reach 100°C and solar tracking concentrators are too expensive. In this context, the use of external compound parabolic concentrators (XCPC) for applications operated at medium temperature draws quite attentions because of its higher efficiency than flat plate solar collectors and better cost effectiveness than solar tracking concentrators. However, currently only a few experimental data is available on the actual performance of XCPCs from literatures, especially for the recently new XCPCs with a low concentration ratio. In order to contribute to the knowledge, a series of experiments have been conducted on the new XCPCs recently installed at Bowen Lab, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. The experiments showed that the XCPCs raised the temperature to 170°C, which is 140°C higher than the ambient temperatures, with a thermal efficiency of 29%. Based on the data collected from the experiments, the optical and thermal efficiencies of XCPCs are determined for different solar irradiations, operating temperatures, and incident angles. A new regression model is proposed and fitted accordingly. The experimental data and analysis demonstrated the feasibility and potentials of using XCPCs for applications in medium temperature range such as solar absorption cooling and heating systems, seawater desalination, solar disinfection, post-combustion carbon capture systems and other industrial process heating.