Analysis On The Flux Distribution Over A Parabolic Trough Solar Concentrator Under Non-Ideal Condition

As the heat source, solar thermal system is an important part of solar thermal power station, of which the efficiency affects the power generation efficiency of the power station largely. Thus, the analysis of the flux distribution on the absorber is quite significant.This paper is based on the parabolic trough solar collector, through summarizing and improving the existing method, the following results were achieved:1) Suggest was giving that computational of both finite element method and the Monte Carlo method is very difficult and costs quite a long time. Through the axial independent theorem, a new algorithm developed from the traditional one was settled to reduce the compute dimension. And the difficulty of calculation is reduced from O(N4) to O (N2), and the time it costs shortened to seconds. By using this new algorithm,the flux distribution on the surface of the absorber was achieved.2) In this paper, receivers of the tube absorber and the flat absorber are studied,by using the program of TracePro, the trace the results of reflected rays under the different conditions were gained. What's more, through this new algorithm, the flux distribution on the surface of absorber was achieved.3) Under the condition of tracking error and receiver position error, The flux density distribution of the absorber surface was calculated and analyzed. By using the error parameter as the independent variable, the relationship between the flux density distribution and the error of the receiver surface was obtained.4) The flux density distribution on the flat absorber is clearly non-uniform. The non-uniformity of the flux density distribution can result in a hot spot and a significant heat dissipation problem, which greatly reduces the lifetime and efficiency of the absorber. In this study, it is found that simple flat mirrors can also modify the ray landing location on the absorber and homogenize the flux density distribution.The effect of the homogenizer for flux density uniform is clearly characterized.