Thermal performance investigation of evacuated tube solar collector integrated with parabolic trough

Mechanical engineering

Conventional water heaters are used in rural as well as in urban areas. Now a day’s use of non-conventional energy has been increased. Among them using solar energy for generation of hot water by using flat plate collector is very common. Flat plate collector also occupies the more space. Using evacuated tube rather than flat plate collector increases the efficiency of system. Parabola has the focal length characteristic which is helpful to reflect the sun rays to evacuated tube placed along with the focal length. A new system of evacuated tube along with parabolic trough is developed and studied experimentally. System has 4 set of evacuated tube from which two are with PTC and other two are without PTC to compare the efficiencies. Experiments are conducted by varying inclination angle and mass flow rate of water. Maximum efficiency is achieved at 30° inclination angle using PTC is 80.20%. Performance evaluation is done by comparing efficiency with or without PT with changes in Mass flow rate and inclination angle. Experimental results shows that solar collector integrated PTC has much better collector efficiency.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.