Analysis of Solar Irradiance Variation on Heat Flux and Temperature Distribution for a Dish Concentrator Receiver

Abstract

Concentrated solar power presents immense scope for the deployment of small-scale units focusing on diverse applications, including process heat and rural on/off-grid applications. This paper presents the analysis of solar irradiance variation on heat flux and temperature distribution at the dish concentrator receiver. A solar dish concentrator with a 2.8-m aperture diameter and a 0.4-m depth was used for this analysis. The solar ray intersection between a dish concentrator and its receiver, along with the heat flux distribution prediction, was carried out using SolTrace. The effect of flux intensity variation on temperature distribution at the receiver was investigated using comsol multiphysics. The optical analysis considered 10,000 rays, and 91.65% of them were observed to reach the surface of the receiver. For 1000 W/m2 of beam solar radiation, a peak heat flux and maximum temperature at the concentrator’s focal plane are found to be 32.4 MW/m2 and 923 K, respectively. The validation had been done using previously reported results in the literature to verify the correctness of the present simulation results. The effect of beam solar radiation variation on heat flux intensity and the temperature distribution revealed that both heat flux and temperature increase with increasing solar radiation, which points out the influence of design and operating conditions. Apart from PillBox and Gaussian distributions, the effect of slope and specularity errors was characterized, suggesting a greater sensitivity to the former than the latter.