Thermal performance of parabolic concentrators under Malaysian environment: A case study

Renewable energy generation is becoming more prevalent on today's electric grid. The challenges of increasing the percentage of renewable energy will be dealing with the intermittent nature of renewable sources. Three experimental models with various geometrical sizes and diameter of about 0.5m of solar dish concentrators are used to analyze the effect of geometry on a solar irradiation and temperature and in maximising the solar fraction under Malaysian environment. These models are used to analyze the performance of parabolic concentrating collector's parameters such as reflector materials, aperture diameter, depth of concentrator, size of focal point and temperature at the focal point with different solar irradiations to increase the thermal efficiency. Thermal efficiency of the different dimensional dish concentrators are analysed using an absorber placed at the focal point. There is a significant variation in the efficiency of the concentrator with different reflective materials used. The efficiencies are calculated and results are conclusive. The 3M Silverlux aluminium films are much efficient than stainless steel and increasing the area of the concentrator gives much more considerable variation in the results i.e. efficiency when comparing with the base. Overall, the efficiency of D1 and D2 is over 60% compared to D3, which is 50% in many cases (by neglecting the losses).