Optical Simulation of a Solar Parabolic Collector and Cavity Receivers Using Ray-Tracing Software Tracepro With Native Conditions of Iran for Solar Dryers

Abstract

This paper proposes the design and optical evaluation of a solar dish collector with changeable structure using TracePro software with native conditions of Iran for solar dryers. The designed dish concentrator has a diameter of 1.5m. TracePro's goal is to design and evaluate complex optical systems. Modeling a parabolic concentrator in TracePro can be achieved using several methods. All segments of dish collectors are made of glass (perfect parabolic mirror with a reflection coefficient of 95%). In the ray-tracing simulations, the two cavity receiver model (cylindrical and semi-sphere) is added to study the influence of physical parameters of the cavity. The simulation result shows that semi-spherical receiver is better and it has got better optical performance. Thereby it is highly recommended for various types of solar dryers such as direct drying (solar box dryer), or indirect drying (solar cabinet dryer).