Design, Fabrication and Evaluation of Thermal Performance of Parabolic Trough Collector with Elliptical Absorber Using Zn/H2O Nanofluid
Abstract
In the developed industrial era, solar Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC) is contemplated as the pre-eminent concentrated collector for heat application industries and power generation. In this work PTC of 0.5415 aperture area (Ap) and 103̊ rim angle (β) is designed, fabricated and evaluated at KL University, Andhra Pradesh. In PTC, traditional circular absorber is replaced by elliptical absorber and its heat transfer and efficiency characteristic curves have been studied. Utilizing nanofluids in parabolic trough collectors is one of the most propitious techniques for enhancing thermal performance. Zn/H2O nanofluid is used in the current work as it exhibits high stability compared with copper and aluminum nano particles. Experiments were conducted to observe the effects of these modifications on the useful heat gain, collector efficiency and receiver temperature. The results depicted that by replacing traditional absorber tube with elliptical absorber tube the useful heat gain and thermal efficiency of PTC is increased by 13% and 15.4% respectively. Further by adding Zn/H2O nanofluid along with elliptical absorber tube, the heat gain and efficiency is increased by 20.7% and 22.8% respectively when compared to circular absorber tube
