Abstract—Solar energy is noted for its high reliability than other systems and allows more energy generation than other renewable resources. Solar Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC) is the most proven industry-scale solar generation technology available today. The thermal performance of such devices is of major interest for optimizing the solar field output and increase the efficiency of solar thermal systems. The present work investigates the performance of parabolic trough collector employed for thermal energy storage system. The PTC is integrated with Thermal Energy Storage (TES) system and consists of concentrator made of aluminium sheets of 7.5 m2 and receiver tube of 3m length made of chrome black plated stainless steel and is enclosed by a glass envelope. One dimensional numerical model has been developed and examined to study heat transfer and thermal losses in the receiver. The receiver and glass envelope are divided into small segments. Mass and energy balance are applied to each segment to obtain Partial Differential Equations (PDE). These equations are discretized for transient state and solved numerically for real time solar intensity values. The numerical model is validated by comparing the results with experimental data and the agreement is observed to be good. Experimentation has been carried out in PTC for different mass flow rates. Variations of thermal efficiency, thermal losses and HTF outlet temperatures in PTC and the temperature distribution and cumulative heat energy stored in TES system with respect to charging time for various solar irradiance and mass flow rates have been studied.
Index Terms—Solar energy, parabolic trough collector, numerical model, thermal energy storage.
The authors are with the SSN College of Engineering, Chennai 603110, India (e-mail: nallusamyn@ssn.edu.in, siva3991ram@gmail.com, msuresh@ssn.edu.in).
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Cite:Nallusamy Nallusamy, Panneerselvam Malathi Sivaram, and Mariappan Suresh, "Numerical Modelling of Solar Parabolic Trough Receiver Employed for Thermal Energy Storage System," Journal of Clean Energy Technologies vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 107-113, 2017.