Technical and economic analysis of a novel low-cost concentrated medium-temperature solar collector

Yogesh Bhusal, Ali Hassanzadeh, Lun Jiang and Roland Winston

Renewable Energy, 2020, vol. 146, issue C, 968-985

Abstract: In this manuscript, performance of a novel concentrated solar thermal collector with evacuated tube is studied. The focus is the optimization of cost and performance in respect to commercially available medium temperature collectors (100–300 °C) using thermal and economic index of heat generation system also known as Levelized Cost of Heat. In this project, Levelized Cost of Heat is optimized with material cost reduction while maintaining high thermal performance using economical aluminum fin (instead of copper), a glass cover and highly truncated aluminum reflector. The reflector is truncated using the nonimaging optics methods in order to maximize the optical efficiency while minimizing the material consumption. Also, in order to predict the thermal performance of the proposed collector, analytical and numerical simulation are studied. Finally, the collector is experimentally tested in three stages to measure maximum temperature, maximum efficiency and thermal efficiency at various temperature of heat transfer fluid. The mathematical, numerical and experimental results were found to have good agreement. The results indicate that the collector can operate with optical efficiency of 60%, maximum temperature of 350 °C, thermal efficiency of 51% and 42% at 100 °C and 200 °C respectively while the cost of energy is as low as 2.9 cents/kWh.

Keywords: Concentrated evacuated tube solar collector; Nonimaging optics; Levelized cost of heat; COMSOL multiphysics; Cost optimization; Mathematical modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148119310523
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:146:y:2020:i:c:p:968-985

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2019.07.032

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().