Optical performance investigation on flat receiver for parabolic trough solar collector based on the MCRT method

Abstract

Parabolic trough solar collector (PTC) system with a flat receiver is widely used in concentrating photovoltaic/thermal (CPV/T) systems, where the flat receiver and PTC are the key components to exchange the solar radiation into heat or electricity. The optimal design and geometric structure of PTC using a flat receiver are essential to achieve high efficiency and energy yield for CPV/T systems. In this paper, a mathematical model of PTC with the flat receiver was developed to investigate and evaluate optical properties based on Monte Carlo Ray Tracing method, whose feasibility and reasonability was verified by the comparison between the model and published literature's results. An innovative method was proposed to calculate the minimum width by vectoring. The optimal geometric design for the same geometrical focusing ratio was derived through simulations based on MATLAB. The influence of geometric parameters and errors were discussed, which showed that the optical performance has large variations in local concentration ratio (LCR) at the center of the flat receiver and is superior at rim angles of 75°–90° under ideal conditions with the same geometric focusing ratio. The errors were found to have a significant effect on the optical performance, especially on the peak LCR.