RT Conference Proceedings
T1 Parabolic trough collectors. Fundamentals of heat transfer applied to solar thermal energy.
A1 Parras-Anguita, Luis
A1 Serrano-Aguilera, Juan José
A1 Blanco-Rodríguez, Francisco José
K1 Colectores solares
K1 Energía térmica solar
AB Solar thermal energy has undergone major development in recent years. The mostwidely used technologies are central receiver solar towers and parabolic trough collectors (PTC)[1]. The latter technology has great advantages due to its higher opticaland thermal efficiency, but, despite being a well-proven technique, it presents certainproblems inherent to the manufacturing and durability of some critical elements inthe system. They are generally composed of an absorber tube surrounded by a glasscover and in the intermediate space, a vacuum is created to minimize thermal lossesby convection[2]. The absorber tube is located at the focal line of a parabolic mirrorthat concentrates sun’s rays. To predict the thermal behavior of this type of system,ray-tracing techniques are used to determine the thermal load and accurate correlations are also needed to calculate the convective heat transfer. Also, the original designshows some problems such as the selective coating applied on the absorber surface,whose thermal performance decays with time. Besides, the metal-glass welding arealso a significant weak spot, which due to the thermal expansion can cause the partialor total loss of the vacuum in the aforementioned annulus. In this work we present theresults of the modeling of this type of systems in different working configurations, aswell as a new design proposal to improve the thermal transfer in this type of systems.
YR 2022
FD 2022
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/23698
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/23698
LA eng
NO Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 20 ene 2026