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.
