Design, manufacturing and performance evaluation of a new parabolic trough collector

In this work, a parabolic trough collector system with aperture area of 10.66 m2 was designed, manufactured and evaluated. The experimental study was conducted and realized in the Research and Technology Center of Energy (CRTEn) in Tunisia. In order to evaluate the thermal performance of the PTC, many experimental tests were carried out in keeping with the ASHRAE 93-1986 standard. The intercept and the slope given by the collector's efficiency curve were found to be 0.5586 and 0.3199, respectively. In this context, an experimental performance investigation of typical days (sunny and cloudy days) is presented. The results show that the average thermal efficiency for sunny and cloudy days is found to be 41.63% and 29.3%, respectively and the average useful heat gain are 255.91 W/m2 and 173.78 W/m2 for the sunny and cloudy days, respectively.