Numerical investigation of heat transfer enhancement inside a parabolic trough solar collector using dimpled absorber

Abstract

Three dimensional numerical investigation of heat transfer enhancement in a non-uniformly heated parabolic trough solar collector using dimpled absorber under turbulent flow was incorporated in the current paper. The governing equations were solved using the finite volume methods (CFD) with certain assumptions and appropriate boundary conditions. The Monte Carlo ray trace technique was applied to obtain the heat flux distribution around the absorber tube. The numerical results were validating with the empirical correlations existing in the literature and good agreement was obtained. The present results demonstrate that the inclusion of inserts provide a good performance in heat transfer, also the receiver temperature gradient are shown to reduce with the use of geometrical modification, the absorber geometry have a remarkable effect on the HTF velocity distribution