Improvement of uniformity of irradiance on truncated compound parabolic concentrator by introducing the homogenizer ratio

Mathiyazhagan Shanmugam and Lakshmi Sirisha Maganti

Renewable Energy, 2023, vol. 204, issue C, 580-592

Abstract: A compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) with a flat absorber is widely used in low-concentrating photovoltaic thermal (CPVT) systems. CPC certainly develops non-uniform heat flux distribution over the absorber surface which is significantly reduced by the integration of homogenizer referred as Elongated CPC (ECPC). The objective of the present work is to analyse the effect of homogenizer ratios, truncation ratios and concentration ratios on the heat flux distribution characteristics of a CPC collector. In this paper, a ray tracing simulation is carried out to obtain the heat flux distribution profiles and the same is incorporated within CFD software to obtain the temperature distribution profiles. As a result, it is observed that the optimum truncation ratio would be 0.7 at which uniformity in flux distribution is improved by 3%, with just 2% reduction of average heat flux value. Furthermore, with optimized homogenizer ratio of −0.35 at concentration ratio of 3, 64% improvement in uniformity of flux distribution has been noticed. From the study, it has been concluded that for different concentration ratios of 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, the optimum homogenizer ratio is observed to be −0.9, −0.55, −0.35, −0.25, −0.2, −0.15, −0.15 and −0.05 respectively.

Keywords: Compound parabolic concentrator; Ray tracing method; Heat flux distribution; Non-uniformity; Elongated compound parabolic concentrator (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148123000502
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:204:y:2023:i:c:p:580-592

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2023.01.041

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 ().