Heat Transfer Enhancement Analysis of Tube Receiver for Parabolic Trough Solar Collector With Central Corrugated Insert

Abstract

Tube receiver with central corrugated insert was introduced as the absorber tube of parabolic trough receiver to increase the overall heat transfer performance of the tube receiver for parabolic trough solar collector (PTC) system. The Monte Carlo ray tracing method (MCRT) coupled with finite volume method (FVM) was adopted to investigate flow characteristics and the heat transfer performance of tube receiver for parabolic trough solar collector system. The numerical results were successfully validated with the empirical correlations existing in the literature. The numerical results indicated that the introduction of the corrugated insert inside the absorber tube of the parabolic trough receiver can effectively enhance the heat transfer performance, where the average Nusselt number can be increased up to 3.7 times compared to the smooth absorber. While the overall heat transfer performance factor can be found to be in the range of 1.3–2.6. The results indicate that the heat transfer increases with increasing corrugated insert twist ratio and increases also with decreasing pitch between two corrugations.