Extreme Seeking for the Optimal Design of the Thermal Energy Storage Tank in a Trough Solar Collector System

Abstract

An extreme seeking (ES) method is given for the optimal design of the thermal energy storage (TES) tank in a trough solar collector system. The energy storage tank in such a solar energy collector performs a filter which regulates the heat transfer in some applications. It is desirable that the volume of the TES tank is optimized in terms of the best performance of heat regulation. The main idea is to construct a simulation scheme that emulates repeatedly the dynamical process and varies the key parameter of the tank at all iterations. The governing algorithm is a convex optimization. A case study that incorporates the above method is examined in the city of a province in China. It is shown in the numerical results that the volume of the TES tank is key variable that influences the performance of heat transfer; the proposed ES method is effective to seek the optimal volume.