DESIGN, CONSTRUCTION, AND TESTING OF A PARABOLIC TROUGH SOLAR CONCENTRATOR SYSTEM FOR HOT WATER AND MODERATE TEMPERATURE STEAM GENERATION

Abstract

Three parabolic trough collectors, with its two axes sun manual tracking system were designed, constructed, and operated in order to generate hot water and moderate temperature steam. An experimental investigation for testing the performance of a PTC is presented. The tests have been carried out in NAJAF climatic conditions (32.02º N, 44.33º E) during selective days of August. The thermal performance of PTC evaluated according to the Standard ASHRAE 93-1986 (RA 91) and the efficiency curve for the PTC was estimated. In the performance analysis of the PTC array, the effects of collector inlet temperature, ambient conditions, two cases for glass receiver and the variation in mass flow rate of the working fluid were investigated. The tests were performed by collecting the data the outdoor measurements to evaluate the instantaneous thermal efficiency for PTC. A peak efficiencies close to (50%, 18.8%) were obtained for solar collectors with evacuated and non-evacuated glass receiver respectively at higher flow rate. The collector efficiency equation that is obtained in the present work agrees with other researches.