Theoretical analysis and experimental verification of parabolic trough solar collector with hot water generation system

Abstract

The modeling of a parabolic trough collector with hot water generation system with a well-mixed type storage tank using a computer simulation program is presented in this paper. This is followed by an experimental verification of the model and ananalysis of the experimental results. The maximum difference between the predicted and the actual storage tank water temperature values is found as 9.59% only. This variation is due to the difference between the actual weather during the test period compared to hourly values and the convection losses from the collector receiver, which were not constant as accounted by the computer simulation program.