Design and Fabrication of Parabolic Trough Collector Using Modified Evacuated Tube

Abstract

An evacuated tube solar collector using therminol D-55 / Transformer oil as heat transfer fluid coupled with parabolic trough is studied in this paper. An experimental set-up is to be constructed to study the performance of evacuated tube collector with therminol D-55 / Transformer oil as heat transfer fluid. The parabolic trough is coupled with evacuated tube collector for better performance. In the traditional solar collectors water is used as heat transfer fluid. The problems in using water as heat transfer fluid are addressed in detail in this paper. The temperature characteristics of heat transfer fluid and water in the storage tank and the heating efficiency is to be determined under various conditions. The efficiency of therminol based evacuated tube collector coupled with parabolic trough is 40% more than that of water based evacuated tube collector coupled with parabolic trough. This study projects the potential of therminol based evacuated tube solar collector coupled with parabolic trough in the instant hot water generation. Also a copper coil is incorporated in the collector through which the water is passed. This setup will help in achieving higher temperature at the outlet thereby increasing the overall thermal efficiency of the PTC.