Optical modeling of corrugation cavity receiver for large-aperture solar parabolic dish collector

ABSTRACT

This article presents an optical investigation of a corrugation cavity receiver for a 100 m² parabolic dish collector (PDC). The performance of PDC depends on the selection of the receiver and its mounting distance from the collector base (H) to receive a high amount of reflected radiation. This work performs optical modeling for PDC with a designed corrugation cavity receiver using commercial software, ASAP® 2013. The motivation for this study is derived from the fact that the entrapped internal reflection within the receiver optimizes the system’s optical efficiency. The receiver geometry is such that it attributes to increasing internal reflection and average heat flux intensification. The present optical model is validated with the available literature. The influential geometrical and optical parameters of the receiver have been optimized by simulation by varying the aperture diameter (d_a,r) from 0.504 to 0.604 m, surface absorptivity (α) from 75 to 95%, receiver coil’s outer and inner pitch (P_o and P_i) from 0.00667 to 0.00909 m, and angle of taper (θ_i) from 50° to 56° for H = 5.35–5.65 m. The performance of the optimized receiver is compared with the conical cavity receiver and is found to be excellent among all values of H. This optical modeling can be expected to be helpful for engineers and researchers in designing the optimized optical receiver for solar parabolic dish collector systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Solar energy
• parabolic dish collector
• corrugation cavity receiver
• optical performance
• ray tracing

Acknowledgements

The financial support provided by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, Grant ID: DST/TMD/CERI/RES/2020/14(C) is duly acknowledged.

Table

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).