CFD Simulation of Temperature Distribution in a Parabolic Trough Collector

The aim of this paper is to assess the thermal performance of a parabolic trough collector where the thermophysical characteristics of the heat transfer fluid, the glass envelope, and the absorber pipe are temperature dependent for which we have created our own mathematical correlations. The structure of a parabolic trough collector consists of a reflecting mirror, a heat transfer fluid circulating in an absorber tube that is covered by a glass envelope. The studied model has been subjected to seasonal variations (solstices and equinoxes days) of solar radiation along with the concentrated heat flux reflected from the parabolic trough mirror for conditions at Tetouan city, Morocco. The amount of diffuse and beam solar radiation required has been modelled using the solar load model under Ansys Fluent software environment. The estimation of the heat transfer mechanism of our model has been done by solving Navier Stokes equations, also, the solar discrete ordinate model (DO) has been used to simulate radiation heat exchange on the receiver. The results have shown that the temperature of the heat collector element reaches its maximum values at equinoxes days compared to solstices days, also, it is found that the use of temperature-dependent properties enhances the thermal performance of the model by 1.4%.