Improving the energy distribution uniformity of solar dish collector system under tracking error using a cavity receiver position adjustment method

Abstract

The tracking error of solar dish collector (SDC) system will cause extremely non-uniform energy distribution and local high flux in circumference surface of the cavity receiver, which brings serious challenges to safe and efficient operation of SDC system. Improve tracking accuracy is a conventional but costly solution, while this paper proposes a receiver position adjustment method to improve or eliminate the adverse effects of tracking errors, including translational adjustment and rotation adjustment methods. Taking cylindrical and conical cavity receivers as examples, the improved effect of position adjustment methods on circumferential energy distribution of cavity receivers under the tracking error was studied in detail using ray-tracing method and outdoor experiment. The influence of concentrator size, tracking error, mirror slope error, cavity receiver shape and size are fully considered, the evaluation indexes such as peak LCR and energy distribution uniformity before and after the receiver position adjustment are comparative analysis. The results amply demonstrate that the translational adjustment method is very effective to improve the receiver's energy distribution uniformity and significantly reduce the peak LCR, but rotational adjustment method has not significantly. This work provides a new solution to eliminate the adverse effects of tracking errors in SDC system, which has the advantage of low-cost and easy to implement.