Enhancement and characteristics study of parabolic trough solar collector by using magnesium oxide coating on solar tubes

Abstract

In the modern era, various engineering applications utilize renewable solar energy, and recent prospects aim to enhance solar thermal collector efficiency through nanotechnology found to enhance solar performance. While using the parabolic trough collector, it found excellent solar conversion efficiency and attained the maximum temperature of the working fluid. Besides the intermittency due to weather conditions, the output performance will be reduced. This study aims to enhance the performance of parabolic trough solar collector by implementing magnesium oxide (MgO) coating over the tubes as 30, 20, and 10 µm particles blended with industrial black matt paint to prepare MgO-enhanced coating through the spray pyrolysis process for varying the nanoparticle size with constant thickness coating in the thermal performance of parabolic trough solar collector (PTC). The findings of this research demonstrate that particles with coating material significantly affect the thermal performance of PTC compared with non-coating. The 10 µm MgO coating featured solar collector exploited maximum heat transfer fluid temperature (81.2 °C), increased heat absorption behaviour (662.5 W), optimum thermal and exergy efficiency values of 78.9 and 69.5%, respectively, which is the optimum value rather than all others.