Analytical Expression of Parabolic Trough Solar Collector Performance

Abstract

Abstract:The parabolic trough collector is one of the most developed solar concentrating technologies for medium and high temperatures (up to 800 K). This solar technology is applied in many applications and so its investigation is common. The objective of this study is to develop analytical expressions for the determination of the thermal performance of parabolic trough collectors. The non-linear equations of the energy balances in the parabolic trough collector device are simplified using suitable assumptions. The final equation set includes all the possible parameters which influence the system performance and it can be solved directly without computational cost. This model is validated using experimental literature results. Moreover, the developed model is tested using another model written in Engineering Equation Solver under different operating conditions. The impact of the inlet fluid temperature, flow rate, ambient temperature, solar beam irradiation, and the heat transfer coefficient between cover and ambient are the investigated parameters for testing the model accuracy. According to the final results, the thermal efficiency can be found with high accuracy; the deviations are found to be up to 0.2% in the majority of the examined cases. Thus, the results of this work can be used for the quick and accurate thermal analysis of parabolic trough collector. Moreover, the analytical expressions give the possibility for optimizing solar thermal systems driven by parabolic trough collectors with lower computational cost.

Optical and Transport Properties of Metal–Oil Nanofluids for Thermal Solar Industry: Experimental Characterization, Performance Assessment, and Molecular Dynamics Insights

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Polynomial Expressions for the Thermal Efficiency of the Parabolic Trough Solar Collector

“…Xu et al [27] used Formula (11) with all the terms in order to approximate the PTC performance. Furthermore, it has to be said that there are studies that tried to determine some analytical expressions for the PTC efficiency curves [28,29].…”

Estimation of thermal characteristics for solar parabolic trough collector in selected locations in Egypt".

“…Direct solar irradiation, ambient temperature, optical and thermal analyses of the collector receiver takes into consideration all modes of heat transfer and the nonlinear algebraic equations were solved simultaneously at each instant during a day of computation using Engineering Equation Solver (EES). Evangelos Bellos and Christos Tzivanidis [14] study developed analytical…”

“…We consider the heat transfer fluid thermal properties in our results which effect on the evaluation of the PTC. The below figures (12)(13)(14)(15) represent the thermal behavior of the solar salt with temperature compared to Syltherm 800. We noticed from these figures that the four physical properties (Density, specific heat, viscosity and thermal conductivity) influence the temperature evolution of the fluid.…”