Optical Analysis of an Evacuated Tube Collector with Built-In Semicircular Concentrator for Process Heat Applications

摘要

The aim of this study is to evaluate the optical performance of an Evacuated Tube solar thermal Collector withSemi-Circular concentrator (ETC-SC). An optical simulation model is developed in a ray-tracing software andits consistency is proven through experimental data from the literature. A parametric analysis is then performedto investigate the impact of the absorber’s radius, the absorber’s position and the acceptance angle of the semicircularmirror on the optical efficiency of the collector. The results of this study show that the variation of theabsorber’s radius slightly affects the optical performance of the collector. Regarding the absorber’s position, thegreatest distance studied presented the best results for all incident angles studied. In terms of acceptance angle, itwas shown that for small incident angles, the best performance is shown from the smallest acceptance anglestudied, but for greater incident angles, this relationship is reversed. The results of this study are valuable for thedesign, simulation and performance analysis of the evacuated tube collectors.