Experimental and CFD studies on thermal performance of solar cavity receiver

Abstract

Fossil fuel usage contributes to global warming and these fuels are not green source of energy, and non-renewable energy sources. In recent years several countries have increased the use of renewable energy sources to produce energy and decreased fossil energy sources consumption. Among all the renewable energy resources utilization of solar energy has attracted increasing interest by researchers worldwide. Solar thermal energy is one form of energy and different technologies are available for harnessing solar energy to generate thermal energy for different applications. The thermal energy generation using concentrated solar power with the parabolic dish type collector is one of the important areas of focus among researchers, since higher temperature can be attained through dish collector by increasing the concentration ratio as compared to other solar collectors. In a dish type collector, receiver is a crucial component that absorbs highly concentrated solar energy reflected from the dish reflector and transfers it to the working fluid within the receiver. The literature shows that the overall performance of the collector system can be improved by selection of proper material and geometry for the receiver, coil configuration in the receiver and the heat transfer fluid circulated in the coil to maximize the heat transfer and minimize the heat losses from the system. Less number of attempts has been carried out by researchers to improve the performance of the solar collector system by concentrating combination of these parameters on solar receiver. In this regard this work aims to analyze the effect of materials, geometries, coil configuration and heat transfer fluid on the thermal performance of the cavity receiver in a concentrated solar power system. newline