Temperature and Flux Measurement of a Commercial Parabolic Dish-Stirling

Abstract

The cost of renewable energy, especially solar energy is constantly reducing, hence, encouraging more solar energy projects to develop, specifically in the United Arab Emirates. Most of the projects developed are focused on photovoltaic (PV), however, technologies such as concentrated solar power (CSP) can be an alternative especially for industrial process heat application as they have a substantial share of one third of the total energy consumption in the world. CSP systems such as parabolic dish can be used to produce the high temperatures required for these systems. This work will focus on studying and analysing a commercial parabolic dish developed by a Swedish company called Azelio. An optical model is created using a commercial software called TracePro which is used simulate how the dish system concentrates solar energy in a perfect environment. In addition, two experimental setups have been developed to measure the temperature and the flux of the dish system. The results obtained from the flux measurement setup validated the optical model. The maximum flux obtained by the optical model was 163 kW/m2 and the maximum flux obtained from the experiment was 155 kW/m2 and this resulted in a 5% loss. However, the results obtained from the temperature experiment indicated significant loss due to dust accumulation, unclear weather, optical losses, and thermal losses especially due to radiation. Hot spots were visible on the thermal map generated by Matlab, and this indicated that the mirrors needed to be re-aligned for better performance. The losses varied between 62% to 98%, increases with higher DNI and temperature. Furthermore, the dish system proved that it could be a good option for daily heat production for industrial processes.

Date of Award	May 2021
Original language	American English