Abstract
Low temperature industrial thermal applications like process heating involving solar thermal technology renders the usage of inexpensive air filled annuli receivers despite they are below par in thermal performance. This work is cantered around the air filled receiver system and more importantly try to assess both conventional and modified air filled annulus system using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in terms of their performance parameters. For modification purpose, conventional receiver was fitted with thermal insulation in non-concentrating half section of receiver which is actually short of concentrated sun’s radiation. Finally it was simulated for significantly reduced circumferential temperature distribution (CTD) around the absorber and was compared with conventional air filled annulus receiver. This comparison could be supposed to serve as a means of advancement for the development of small scale solar thermal based heat producing plants.
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Abbreviations
- A :
-
Area (m2)
- C p :
-
Specific heat at constant pressure (kJ/kg K)
- D :
-
Diameter (m)
- k :
-
Thermal conductivity (kW/m K)
- k in :
-
Turbulent intensity (%)
- k T :
-
Turbulent conductivity (kW/m K)
- \( \dot{m} \) :
-
Mass flow rate (kg/s)
- P :
-
Pressure (N/m2)
- q :
-
Heat flux (W/m2)
- T :
-
Temperature (K)
- t :
-
Time (s)
- u, v, w :
-
Velocities in x, y, z direction
- V :
-
Velocity (m/s)
- x, y, z :
-
Cartesian coordinates
- ε :
-
Turbulent energy dissipation or emissivity
- ρ :
-
Density (kg/m3)
- µ :
-
Dynamic viscosity (Pa s)
- µ t :
-
Turbulent eddy viscosity (Pa s)
- Δ :
-
Increment value
- \( \varphi \) :
-
Circumferential angle
- a :
-
Absorber interaction point
- a-cond :
-
Conduction losses from absorber
- a-conv :
-
Buoyancy induced convective heat transfer
- a-f, conv :
-
Heat transfer from absorber to fluid via. convection
- a-rad :
-
Radiation losses from absorber
- avg :
-
Average
- f :
-
Heat transfer fluid
- g-conv :
-
Convection losses from glass to ambient
- g :
-
Condition pertaining to glass envelope
- g-rad :
-
Radiation losses from glass envelope
- in :
-
Condition at inlet
- i, j :
-
Pertaining to nodes i, j
- o :
-
Condition at outlet
- sol :
-
Solar incidence
- sol-abs :
-
Solar radiation transmitted through glass envelop to absorber via. radiation from absorber to trapped air in annulus
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Acknowledgement
All the authors bestow a profound gratitude to Mr. Ram Chandra for his invaluable feedback and suggestions. Along with this, work of all the authors used in references is highly appreciated.
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Chandra, Y.P., Singh, A., Mohapatra, S.K., Kesari, J.P. (2017). Circumferential Temperature Analysis of One Sided Thermally Insulated Parabolic Trough Receiver Using Computational Fluid Dynamics. In: Deep, K., et al. Proceedings of Sixth International Conference on Soft Computing for Problem Solving. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 547. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3325-4_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3325-4_12
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