Date of Publication :18th October 2023

Abstract: Solar energy is the renewable and clean forms of energy. The importance of energy to our society is growing to make certain the quality of life and to smoothly speed up the other elements of our economy. As a result of growing demand of energy, shortage of fossil fuel and other resources, changing climate continuously, and environmental protection, the need for renewable energy sources has been growing rapidly. However, there is an urgent need to cope with intermittency and fluctuation of renewable energies. In solar energy applications, the solar air heaters (SAHs) were commonly used as heat exchanger for abundantly available solar heat. Air heating is one of the major solar thermal applications, used for space heating, laundry, crop drying, paper mill, food industries and other drying processes. This paper presents an investigation of design optimization of the optical efficiency of circular solar concentrator (through a critical parametrical analysis of different geometrical configurations). In this study, various key parameters of the circular hyperboloid solar concentrator design were systematically varied, including the aspect ratio of the circular aperture, the focal length of the concentrator, the angle of incidence of the incoming sunlight, and the shape of the reflector surface. The impact of these parameters on the overall optical efficiency of the circular hyperboloid solar concentrator was then measured, and the optimal values for each parameter were determined. The maximum optical efficiency obtained is 78% of concentrator height 1000mm and concentration ratio 22x. As acceptance angle increases, optical efficiency decreases drastically.

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