Parabolic Trough Collector, a Novel Design for Domestic Water Heating Application

Abstract

CSP technology is grooving up with various applications and different devices due to high thermal efficiency. Parabolic trough collector attracts researchers' due to its versatility. Many researchers were working on designing trough to improve the efficiency of the collector. As per the literature serve carried out most of them are working on high-temperature applications. Our aim is to design a novel parabolic trough collector which is useful in low-temperature applications like domestic water heating. This paper discusses detailed drawing and dimensions of PTC which is useful to researchers. The main advantage of this design is easy assembly and maintenance. Keywords: parabolic trough collector (PTC), heat transfer fluid (HTF), receiver, collector, solar thermal I. INTRODUCTION Solar thermal is the fast-growing technology now a day due to research being done to explore its applicability in different fields [1,2,3,20,24] and to enhance its thermal efficiency [4,21,22,25,28,30,32,38]. CSP technology is the most effective part of solar thermal with various applications and different devices [2,24]. Parabolic trough collector (PTC) attracts researchers' due to its versatility in applications resulting in a large number of reports on designing trough to improve the collector efficiency for hightemperature applications and testing [9,10,15,17,30,31,34,36]. PTC is line type concentrator which is designed based on the parabola. Normally it is available with a tracking system to improve the efficiency and effectiveness. Maximum temperature achieved by PTC is reported to be 520 °C by using molten salt as a Heat Transfer Fluid (HTF) [12]. Many researchers are working on PTC and reported different designs [1,3,5,15,18,27]; some of them are working on various applications of PTC [6,8,11,16,19,23,26,33,35,37]. The main area of research focuses on improvement in efficiency [7,12,16,18,21], the effect of the receiver and reflective material [13,14,27,32,35,37,38], heat transfer fluids and storage [4,12,25,29]. However, the Parabolic trough collector can be a very useful tool to harvest the solar energy for domestic applications, work done in this field is very less. In this paper, we present a novel design of a parabolic trough collector useful for the domestic heating applications.

Pathway to Multi-Response Characterization of the Improved Elliptical Vessel Solar Receiver for Efficiencies Maximization

“…The insulation material and the thermocouples are shown in Figure 4 (A) and (B) respectively. An aluminum foil tape reflector was used which gave the best reflective quality as well as a higher intercept factor as tested by [6]. There are many different thicknesses of aluminum foil tape, including 48 mm and 72 mm, as well as lengths of 20 meters which are early obtainable from the local market at low and affordable prices.…”

“…see Equation (6). Where 𝑟.𝑒𝑥𝑡 is the receiver external diameter, 𝑎 is the conductivity of air and N ua represents Nusselt number of air and can be determined by the following equations, as in Equations.…”