Author : Nitin A. Kumbhar, S.R. Shinde and V.S. Shinde

In the family of the solar collectors, parabolic trough collector presently getting significant interest for a wide range of applications from air heating applications, hot water production to steam generation and industrial process heat applications. The high level of concentration achievable with parabolic trough collector diminishes the drawback coupled with the constraint of some level of tracking as compared to flat plate collectors. Also, parabolic trough collectors are simpler than other collectors. At the same time, time dependent nature of the solar energy can be eliminated by introducing thermal energy storage system in the parabolic trough collector. This work has been carried out to investigate the performance of parabolic trough collector based air heating system integrated with latent thermal energy storage system. The instantaneous parabolic trough collector efficiency has been evaluated without and with incorporation of thermal energy storage system with variation in mass flow rate of air from 0.0022 kg/sec to 0.0044 kg/sec. The result revels that introducing latent thermal energy storage system in the parabolic trough collector enhances the collector efficiency by 17% at the same time it gives the required performance even at low solar radiation intensity. The collector efficiency increases with increase in mass flow rate of air.

Keywords: Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC), PCM, Latent Thermal Energy Storage System