Sharif Digital Repository

The exploitation of solar energy facilitates the renewable energy paradigm. In this regard, parabolic trough collectors (PTC) are considered as a useful set-up to absorb solar energy. Simultaneous study of thermal, thermodynamic, and exergoeconomic performance of PTC systems paves the way for designers and manufacturers to not only have a better insight into understanding the underlying concepts about the operation of PTC systems but also to find the most effective and cost-effective circumstances. This study aims at analyzing a practical PTC system by considering an evacuated absorber tube with glass cover, non-uniform heat flux, and taking into account the convective and radiative heat... 

Direct steam generation (DSG) in parabolic trough collectors causes an increase to competitiveness of solar thermal power plants (STPP) by substitution of oil with direct steam generation that results in lower investment and operating costs. In this study the integrated solar combined cycle system with DSG technology is introduced and techno-economic assessment of this plant is reported compared with two conventional cases. Three considered cases are: an integrated solar combined cycle system with DSG technology (ISCCS-DSG), a solar electric generating system (SEGS), and an integrated solar combined cycle system with HTF (heat transfer fluid) technology (ISCCS-HTF).This study shows that... 

The use of solar energy concentration systems for achieving performance enhancements in the Photovoltaic/thermal hybrid solar systems and reduction of initial costs is an idea that has been studied for years. In this article a new structure for parabolic trough photovoltaic/thermal collector is proposed and its thermal and electrical performances are experimentally investigated. The receiver of this concentrator contains a triangular channel with an outer surface covered with photovoltaic cells and thermoelectric modules with a specific arrangement so that in addition to absorbing heat, a larger portion of the solar radiation is directly converted to electricity. Hence, the performance of... 

Optical and thermal analysis of the most well-known solar concentrator system; parabolic trough collector (PTC) are investigated and analyzed. To evaluate performance of the PTC, four cities of Iran with different weather conditions are chosen as case studies. Effective parameters such as concentration ratio, incident angle correction factor, collector mass flow rate are considered. The main objective of this work is evaluation of the solar energy potential using PTC in under consideration cities with different climates. Numerical modeling of the analysis is done using MATLAB software. Simulation results shows that Shiraz, with an average annual thermal efficiency of 13.91% and annual useful... 

One of the efficient solar energy harvesting technics is the parabolic trough concentrated solar power plant. However, if the concentrated solar power plant were not equipped with a storage system, the power plant capacity factor would be deficient. Latent thermal energy storage system using phase change material (PCM) is a high energy density storage system to provide durable energy with a constant temperature. In this study, first, a dynamic analysis is performed implementing TRNSYS software on the parabolic trough concentrated solar power plant located in Shiraz, Iran. Consequently, this system is assisted by the latent thermal energy storage system to improve its performance and capacity... 

This research is aimed at geometric analysis of parabolic trough solar collector (PTC) in different sizes of the main components of the system. The rate of the Local Concentration Ratio (LCR) on the receiver tube and optical efficiency are two main features in geometric optimization of the parabolic trough solar collectors. In this work, parabolic trough solar collector was optimized for different sizes with three design variables: the receiver diameter, the collector aperture width and the rim angle. The method used in this research was the Monte Carlo Method (MCM) in MATLAB. The optical and geometric modeling was developed for coding in MATLAB. For the case study, a parabolic trough solar... 

The exergoeconomic analysis is a powerful tool to study an energy system and provide rational decision-making for it. This paper is aimed at exergoeconomic optimization and sensitivity analysis evaluation of the results of a commercial parabolic trough collector (PTC). First, an analysis of optical, thermal, exergy, and economic equations of the PTC system is presented. Then, the objective function and variables are optimized through MATLAB software using the hybrid algorithm code. The objective function as the exergy loss rate is a combination of exergy loss and system cost. The evaluation of the results has been carried out considering the radiation intensity in different months of the... 

The main focus of this paper is to present thermodynamic and economic analyses and multi-objective optimization of a novel geothermal-solar multigeneration system. The system aims to produce hydrogen, freshwater, electricity, cooling load, and hot water and designed based on geothermal and solar energy. After modeling and thermodynamic and economic analysis, exergy destruction rate, exergy efficiency and, cost rate were calculated for each component of the system. The results showed that the highest amount of exergy destruction was related to parabolic trough collectors (PTCs) and absorption chillers. To select the geothermal fluid of the organic Rankine cycle (ORC), several different fluids...