Abstract
Cameroon lives in the era of great infrastructures in order to reach the economic emergence by 2035. These infrastructures require a solid framework of energy provisions from many natural energy sources and resources that the country possesses. Speaking of natural energy resources, the country is particularly gifted by solar energy potential in the far north. This region of the land is densely populated but much of the populations do not have access to electricity since they live in remote areas far from national electricity grid. Solar thermal energy appears then as real potential to fulfill the growing demand of energy and reduce fossil fuel use dependence. Moreover, it would also be a grandiose opportunity for hospitals in these regions to provide hot water for Sterilization. As the design of a solar thermal plant strongly relies on the potential of direct solar irradiance and the performance of a solar parabolic trough collector (PTC) estimated under the local climate conditions, in this paper, we annually compute direct solar radiation based on monthly average Linke turbidity factor and various tracking modes in two chosen sites in the far north region of Cameroon. Also, a detailed two dimensional numerical heat transfer analysis of a PTC has been performed. The receiver has been divided into many control volumes along his length and each of them is a column consisting of glass, vacuum, absorber and fluid along which mass and energy balance have been applied. Direct solar irradiation, ambient temperature optical and thermal analyses of the collector receiver takes into consideration all modes of heat transfer and the nonlinear algebraic equations were solved simultaneously at each instant during a day of computation using Engineering Equation Solver (EES). To validate the numerical results, the model was compared with experimental data obtained from Sandia National Laboratory (SNL). It has shown a great concordance with a maximum relative error value of 0.35% and thermal efficiency range of systems about 66.67% - 73.2%. It has also been found that the one axis polar East-West and horizontal East-West tracking with 96% and 94% of full tracking mode respectively, were most suitable for a parabolic trough collector throughout the whole year in the two towns considered.
Highlights
The solar collector’s technology offers a promising method for the large scale use of solar energy
As the design of a solar thermal plant strongly relies on the potential of direct solar irradiance and the performance of a solar parabolic trough collector (PTC) estimated under the local climate conditions, in this paper, we annually compute direct solar radiation based on monthly average Linke turbidity factor and various tracking modes in two chosen sites in the far north region of Cameroon
There are four main types of concentrating solar power (CSP) technology, namely the dish collector that consists of a parabolic-shaped point focus concentrator in the form of a dish that reflects solar radiation onto a receiver mounted at the focal point; the linear Fresnel collector, which uses a series of long flat, or slightly curved, mirrors placed at different angles to concentrate the sunlight on either side of a fixed linear receiver; the solar tower, or central receiver systems, where sun-tracking mirrors called heliostats focus sunlight onto a receiver at the top of a tower which converts into heat; and the parabolic trough collector (PTC), which use parabolic reflectors in order to concentrate the solar radiation into a small focal line
Summary
The solar collector’s technology offers a promising method for the large scale use of solar energy. A written STAR-CCM + code has been used to implement an efficient multiphase model capable of simulating the dynamics of the multiphase fluid in parabolic-trough solar collectors They concluded that the overall mean squared error between computed and measured temperature values was lower than 6% for all considered cases. According to their simulation findings, the one axis polar East-West and horizontal East-West tracking systems were most desirable for a parabolic trough collector throughout the whole year in Algeria as stated in the paper They concluded that the liquid water is the best thermal fluid as it presents many advantages: low cost and good thermal performance, only useful for low temperature applications (T < 100 C) such as domestic hot water, water distillation, air-conditioning and refrigeration. Optical and thermal losses and pressure drop along the flowing pipe, the great feature of this model is that it performs and evaluates all of the aforementioned parameters during a test day
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