Integrated optical and thermal model to investigate the performance of a solar parabolic dish collector coupled with a cavity receiver

Abstract

The cavity receiver is the most promising type of receiver, which drops the heat loss and converts the incoming concentrated radiation to useful energy. In this work, the coupled optical-thermal investigation is performed for a novel cavity receiver of a 40 m2 parabolic dish collector to estimate the thermal performance. The variation of thermal performance with inclination γ, wind direction ψ, wind speed V, and inlet temperature THTF,i has been discussed. SolTrace and ANSYS® Fluent are used for optical and thermal modeling, respectively. Surface errors, heat flux at each coordinate of the receiver, and the parabolic dish effect have been considered in the study. The text user interface (TUI) over graphical has been adopted in ANSYS® to reduce the computational expenditure for variation of parameters. In thermal modeling, a user-defined function (UDF) is applied for mapping data from SolTrace simulation with 107 rays. Therminol 66, as heat transfer fluid, is used in the receiver coils. The optical performance of 84.15% is achieved at an aiming height of 4.5 m. The thermal performance of 73.11% is obtained as maximum in no-wind conditions for 90° tilt. The worst thermal performance is obtained in side-on wind. Further, the performance has been compared with other models and found to be performing well.