Thermal and thermodynamic analysis of a parabolic trough receiver at different concentration ratios and rim angles

Abstract

Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.

In this paper, a three dimensional analysis of the thermal and thermodynamic performance of a parabolic trough receiver is investigated. The analysis involves determination of the heat flux on the receiver’s absorber tube using the Monte Carlo raytrace method and using computational fluid dynamics to investigate the thermal and thermodynamic performance. Our analysis shows that the use of higher concentration ratios increases the receiver’s temperature gradients and entropy generation rates. For rim angles lower than 60o, the high heat flux peaks result in high temperature gradients in the receiver’s absorber tube as well as high entropy generation rates. The absorber tube temperature gradients and entropy generation rates do not change significantly as rim angles increase above 80o. The influence of rim angles on receiver thermal performance reduces as the flow rates increase above 8.55 × 10- 3 m3/s at all inlet temperatures for any given concentration ratio.