Conference article

Concentrated sunlight has been used to perform useful tasks from ancient time. There are number of varieties of collector trough being used to perform these tasks. Each Varity comes with advantages as well as disadvantages. The aim of this research project is to improve the design of collector trough in terms of efficiency; lessen the heat declination; and eliminate the sun tracker mechanism. Most of the existing solar concentrators use open type trough which cause the rapid heat declination. The design attempted in this paper is to lessen this rapid declination and improve the efficiency by introducing Closed Environment Collector Trough (CECT). The CECT consists of spherical collector trough having a reflective bottom surface; five evenly distributed lenses; 30o apart from each other; on the upper half of the sphere to eliminate the sun tracker and hexagonal glasses to make the environment closed and impose greenhouse effect on the system. The CECT acts like a heat trap and keeps the heat inside the chamber for a longer period of time which basically lessens the heat declination. The reflective surface and lenses concentrate the sun light directly on the fluid pipe. In this paper novel design has been proposed to improve the overall performance of solar collector troughs.

Solar Thermal Collector; Concentrated Solar Power; Closed Environment Collector Trough