Field Testing of Manufacturable Advanced Low-Cost Receiver for Parabolic Trough Solar Power

Current parabolic trough receiver tubes are evacuated and operate at temperatures below 400°C. Manufacturing and maintaining evacuated tube receivers over an expected 30-year lifetime is costly, and complex. In addition, their temperature limitations affect plant cycle efficiency. In this project a novel low cost non-evacuated and thermally insulated receiver tube is field tested for thermal capacitance and optical efficiency. Three measurements of temperature were takine for the thermal capacitance test resulting in a heat loss of 0.6kW at 10oC and 1.2kW at 20°C. Ten optical efficiency tests were performed, and the mean was found to be 78.3% with a standard deviation of 1.37%.