The hot fluid can be piped to a heat engine, which uses the heat energy to drive machinery, or to generate electricity. This solar energy collector is the most common and best known type of parabolic trough.
What is the function of a parabolic trough?
The parabolic trough reflector is a solar thermal energy collector designed to capture the sun’s direct solar radiation over a large surface area and focus, or more generally “concentrate it” onto a small focal point area increasing the solar energy received by more than a factor of two which means more overall heat …
How are CSP used?
Concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) technologies can be used to generate electricity by converting energy from sunlight to power a turbine, but the same basic technologies can also be used to deliver heat to a variety of industrial applications, like water desalination, enhanced oil recovery, food processing.
What is a parabolic trough system?
Parabolic trough is a set of concave mirrors that concentrate solar rays on the receiver tube that is located in the focus. These troughs can track the Sun around one axis, typically oriented north–south to ensure the highest possible efficiency.
What are the different types of parabolic solar system?
There are two major types of linear concentrator systems: parabolic trough systems, where receiver tubes are positioned along the focal line of each parabolic mirror, and linear Fresnel reflector systems, where one receiver tube is positioned above several mirrors to allow the mirrors greater mobility in tracking the …
How does a parabolic mirror work?
The parabolic reflector transforms an incoming plane wave travelling along the axis into a spherical wave converging toward the focus. Conversely, a spherical wave generated by a point source placed in the focus is reflected into a plane wave propagating as a collimated beam along the axis.
What is a CSP system?
Concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) systems have many components that help convert sunlight into usable energy. CSP systems are the integrated collection of the many different processes and components required to collect, convert, store, and deliver solar-thermal heat.
How does a CSP system work?
CSP plants generate electric power by using mirrors to concentrate (focus) the sun’s energy and convert it into high-temperature heat. That heat is then channeled through a conventional generator. Within the United States, CSP plants have been operating reliably for more than 15 years.
What is trough system?
Trough systems convert the heat from the sun into electricity. Because of their parabolical shape, troughs can focus the sun at 30–60 times its normal intensity on a receiver pipe located along the focal line of the trough.
What is a parabolic trough CSP system?
Parabolic Trough Systems: In a parabolic trough CSP system, the sun’s energy is concentrated by parabolically curved, trough-shaped reflectors onto a receiver pipe running along about a meter above the curved surface of the mirrors.
What is parabolic trough-shaped mirror?
Parabolic trough-shaped mirrors produce a linear focus on a receiver tube along the parabola’s focal line as illustrated in Fig. 1.1. The complete assembly of mirrors plus receiver is mounted on a frame that tracks the daily movement of the sun on one axis.
How does a parabolic trough solar system work?
Parabolic-trough solar concentrating systems are parabolic-shaped collectors made of reflecting materials. The collectors reflect the incident solar radiation onto its focal line toward a receiver that absorbs the concentrated solar energy to raise the temperature of the fluid inside it as shown in Fig. 8.6 [57].
How do parabolic trough reflectors work?
Parabolic trough reflectors can achieve a concentration ratio of up to 100. Some parabolic trough plants have been built with heat energy storage, which allows them to operate for longer periods each day. A hybrid solar/natural gas plant can be created by adding a solar collection field to a combined cycle gas turbine plant.
