Enhancement Techniques of Parabolic Trough Collectors: A Review of Past and Recent Technologies

Abstract

To tackle the climate change and global warming, the world needs to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels. In recent years clean, renewable and sustainable sources of energy such as solar, wind, tidal etc. have thus become widely popular. In particular solar thermal energy has emerged as a major contender in the quest to reduce CO2 emissions especially for regions with hot tropical climate. The light or solar energy/heat from the sun can be harnessed to produce electricity via Photovoltaic Devices (PV) or Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants. The CSP plants operate on Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI), which is defined as the amount of received solar energy per unit area on the surface held normal to the rays of the sun. Depending upon the methodology to capture the suns energy, the CSP technology can be categorized into several technologies, four of the most common ones being; parabolic trough collectors (PTC: which is our focus), linear Fresnel reflectors, parabolic dishes and solar towers, in Figure 1.