بناء واختبار مجمع حوضي ذو قطع مكافئ لتوليد البخار

Building and Testing a Parabolic Trough Collector to Generate Steam

Three parabolic trough solar collectors (PTC ( were constructed, operated and tested in order to generate hot water and steam at moderate temperatures. In this study, an experimental investigation for testing the performance of a PTC array (3.73 m2 total aperture area) is presented. The model, which is made up of reflector surfaces, support structure with sun manual tracking and absorber pipes, was fabricated using a locally sourced material. The collectors are made of aluminium with the aim of having a lightweight and weather resistant. The design of the collectors considers unshading receivers, whereas sun manual tracker has been developed (using two-axis) to track the beam solar radiation. The experimental tests have been carried out in Najaf City climatic conditions (32.02º N, 44.33º E) during selective days of the month August. The data measured were collected for eight days, the 5th, 6th, 8th – 13th of Aug 2016. The tests were performed using the outdoor measurements to evaluate the useful heat gain and the instantaneous thermal efficiency. In the performance analysis of the PTC array, the effects of collector inlet temperature, ambient conditions, two types of a receiver and the variation in mass flow rate of the working fluid were investigated. The thermal performance of PTC was evaluated according to the Standard ASHRAE 93-1986 (RA 91) and the efficiency curve for the PTC was estimated. A peak efficiencies close to (50%, 18.8%) were obtained for solar collectors with evacuated and non-evacuated glass receiver respectively at higher flow rate. Steam was generated with a temperature excesses 152 0C and a pressure of 4barG. The collector efficiency equation obtained in the present work compares well with the other reported literature. The final results establish that the technical of using PTC is feasibility for applications requiring thermal energy at temperatures up to 152 ºC.