Design and performance evaluation of a high-temperature cavity receiver for a 2-stage dish concentrator

Abstract

Here a new design of a cavity heat-pipe receiver for a 2-stage dish concentrator is proposed. Both optical and thermal simulations are used for the design and for performance evaluation of the cavity. The receiver was fitted to a conventional 2-stage and an improved (overlapped) 2-stage dish. The latter system configuration shows superior performance compared to the conventional one, in particular in terms of compact structure, uniformity of the incident flux and temperature distribution, and solar-to-thermal efficiency. The variance of the irradiation distribution at the cavity decreased by 25% and the largest adjacent temperature difference decreased by 54%. In total, the conversion efficiency increased from 61.3% to 68.6%. Moreover, the new receiver with the improved 2-stage dish concentrating system has less limits of scales (e.g. weight and volume) compared to the traditional single dish design.