Journal of Architectural Environment & Structural Engineering Research | Volume 02 | Issue 03 | July 2019

Journal of Architectural Environment & Structural Engineering Research

https://ojs.bilpublishing.com/index.php/jaeser

ARTICLE
Design and Analysis of Parabolic Trough Solar Water Heating System
Samia Tabassum* Laila Sharmin Muhammad Shahriar Bashar Mashudur Rahaman Su-
mon Chandra Debnath Mahfuza Khanam
Institute of Fuel Research & Development, Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Dhaka, Bangla-
desh

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Article history Renewable energy technology is one of the prospective sources which can
Received: 16 July 2019 meet the energy demand and can contribute to achieve sustainable develop-
ment goals. Concentrated collectors are widely used in solar thermal power
Accepted: 10 October 2019 generation and water heating system also. It is very popular due to its high
Published Online: 30 November 2019 thermal efficiency, simple construction requirements and low manufactur-
ing cost. This paper is concerned with an experimental study of parabolic
Keywords: trough collector for water heating technology. It focuses on the performance
Solar energy of concentrating solar collector by changing the reflector materials (alumi-
num sheet, aluminum foil and mirror film). In Bangladesh, it is possible to
Parabolic trough collector use low cost solar concentrating technologies for domestic as well as indus-
Reflector trial process heat applications. The line focusing parabolic trough collectors
Efficiency have been designed, developed and evaluated its performance by collecting
solar radiation, inlet and outlet water temperature, flow rate, efficiency etc.

1. Introduction difficulties in energy sector, Bangladesh Government has

E
taken some initiative by using renewable energy [5]. Ban-
nergy plays a vital role to represent a country, be- gladesh has a vast potential for renewable energy and the
cause it is related to poverty reduction, economic natural availability of alternative energy creates opportuni-
development and security also. Bangladesh has high ties of growth in power sector [6]. Among many renewable
demand of electricity and to meet up this demand- coal, energy sources, solar energy is the most suitable for this
gas, diesels are being used to produce electricity [1-3]. The country. Bangladesh receives an average daily solar radi-
main source of energy is natural gas which is going to run ation of 4-6.5 kWh/m2 and it has an average annual solar
out very soon. In the present scenario, the only use of natu- radiation of nearly 1,900kWh/m2 [5, 6]. In Bangladesh, which
ral gas or non-renewable sources for household use is not a has 200 days of sunlight per year on average, solar energy
good sign for future and also the massive use of fossil fuel systems have the potential to achieve high capacity factors
(coal, gas, Oil or petroleum) in the last century has caused with reduced payback time for consumers. Solar energy
the climate change through the greenhouse effect and pro- source made its way into the homes of millions of people
duced large scale environmental pollution. In the present throughout the world through solar photovoltaic (PV) and
scenario of a huge energy demand, dependency on natural solar thermal energy [7]. By the development of improved
gas certainly creates crisis in future [4]. To reduce future materials and technologies with decreasing cost, solar en-

*Corresponding Author:
Samia Tabassum,
Institute of Fuel Research & Development, Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Dhaka, Bangladesh;
Email: [email protected]

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 Journal of Architectural Environment & Structural Engineering Research | Volume 02 | Issue 03 | July 2019

ergy systems are becoming popular day by day. Solar PV sufficient and so, system development and data production
generates electric power for use in the home or commercial are important as this country has huge potential on solar en-
places, while solar thermal energy systems are used to pro- ergy.
duce hot water, cooking or other purposes. In Bangladesh,
hot water is only used here in winter for domestic purpose. 2. Materials and Method
But in many commercial places and hospitals need a huge
2.1 Experimental Setup
amount of hot water for whole year. For this purpose, solar
thermal utilization can be a great initiative for environ- The experimental setup was placed at the roof top of Insti-
mental protection and conventional energy saving. Solar tute of Fuel Research and Development (IFRD), Bangla-
collector is the major component of any solar system. Solar desh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (BCSIR),
collectors are special kind of heat exchangers that transform Dhaka and performance were evaluated during April -June,
solar radiation energy into heat and transfer this heat to a 2018. Due to the summer season, this area receives highest
fluid (usually air, water etc.) flowing through the collector [8]. solar energy (4-5 Kwh/m2) and average wind velocity re-
There are different kinds of solar collectors (concentrating mains here as 3.9 m/s in this time [26]. The experimental set-
and non-concentrating) which are used worldwide for do- up of the parabolic trough water heater consists of a manual
mestic or industrial water heating [9,10]. The most common tracking system with three parabolic trough collectors and a
concentrating technologies are parabolic trough collector storage tank which is placed above the receivers’ pipe level
(PTC), linear Fresnel reflector, solar dish, and solar tower, [11] so that the heating fluid can flow naturally without pumping
where, parabolic trough collector is one of the most famous system. During the experiment, the parabolic trough solar
technology [12]. This technology uses parabolic shaped re- water heater has been oriented with its focal axis pointed in
flectors to concentrate the incident radiation onto a receiver the East- West (E-W) orientation. A plastic pipe was used to
tube which is placed at the focal line of the trough [13-23]. connect the storage tank and inlet of the water heater. Two
Parabolic trough collector (PTC) is having various advan- copper tubes were placed together at the focal axis of each
tages such as in industrial steam generation [24] and hot wa- single collector. Here, two tubes have been used to increase
ter production [25]. The advantage of solar trough is that it is the water flow time under the sunshine. The solar radiation
clean, cheap and can be supplied thermal energy. J. Ramesh intensity, the water flow rate and the water temperature of
et al. manufactured a solar water heater using the available inlet and outlet were continually measured and the trough
materials (plywood, reflective aluminum sheet, storage was rotated about a horizontal (E-W) axis and adjusted
tanks, and copper tube) and equipment in the workshop. manually so that the solar beam made minimum angle of
They investigated the performance of the solar parabolic incidence with the aperture plane at all time during the ex-
trough collector from total direct radiation on the plane periment. The parabolic trough collector for domestic hot
of the collector, ambient temperature, wind speed, water water application is shown in Figure 1,
flow rate, and inlet and outlet temperatures of the water
inside the absorber tube. They have found that the heat gain
increase depends on time and solar intensity [16]. Pradeep
Kumar K V et al. described a low-cost method for mass
production of PTC with its automated sun tracking system.
They analyzed different types of absorbing materials to im-
prove the performance of solar concentrator and the optical
properties and degradation of the reflecting surfaces were
assessed also [17]. The above-mentioned literature review Figure 1. Parabolic trough solar water heater setup
indicates that there are numerous literature studies which
analyze the performance of a parabolic trough collector.
2.2 Design Parameters
However, the studies which investigate the thermal perfor-
mances of a collector with variation of reflectors are rarely The geometric parameters of a PTC are its aperture
done. Thus, this study suggests a simple design of solar width and length, rim angle, focal length and diameter of
water heater consists of three parabolic trough collectors. the receiver. The parabolic equation in Cartesian coordi-
Different parameters have been measured (solar radiation, nates system can be represented as [22],
inlet and outlet water temperature, flow rate, efficiency)
and the system has been evaluated for different reflectors. x2= 4fy (1)
The study on PTC solar water heater in Bangladesh is not Using equation (1), the height of the parabola (h) can

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 Journal of Architectural Environment & Structural Engineering Research | Volume 02 | Issue 03 | July 2019

be calculated in terms of the focal length (f) and aperture Table 1. Different parameters and their values for the
diameter (D) is [22]: fabricated PTC
Item Sample Value
D
( ) 2 = 4 fh  (2) Aperture length L 0.914 m
2
Aperture diameter D 0.508 m
Rim angle Ѱ 100°
D2 Focal length F 0.104 m
Or, h =  (3)
16 f Receiver diameter D 0.013 m
Concentrator height H 0.152 m
The rim angle is defined as the angle subtended by the Linear diameter S 0.612 m
edges of the reflector at the focus. The rim angle Ѱ is giv-
en by [22]: The solar thermal efficiency of the PTC and useful heat
gain by the circulating water during flow through the ab-
Ψ D sorber tube are estimated by equations (6) and (7),
tan( )=  (4)
2 4f Solar thermal efficiency

Liner diameter Qu mc p (TO − Ti )

µc
= =  (6)
Ib A Ib A
 pq p+q 
=S  + t ln( )  (5)
 t t  Heat gained by water

Here, Qu = m × c p × (TO − Ti )  (7)

D Where,
P= ,
2 Qu = Useful heat gain-W
Ti &TO= Inlet and outlet water temperature respectively - °C
m = Mass flow rate of water - kg/s
t =2f
Cp = the specific heat of water - J/(kg-K)
Ib = direct solar beam radiation - W/m2
A= aperture area of the collector - m2
=q (p 2
+ t2 ) There are basically four major parts of a parabolic
trough concentrator system, which are:
From the selected values of aperture diameter and con- (1) Reflecting surface.
centrator height, the focal length, rim angle and the liner (2) Absorber tube.
diameter of the concentrator were calculated from equa- (3) Supporting structure.
tions (3), (4) & (5) respectively. (4) Inlet and outlet pipes.
The collector’s reflecting surface is curved in a para-
bolic shape so that the solar radiations which are collid-
ing are getting reflected most of all the radiations to the
receiver tube. In our study, as a reflecting surface, three
different types of reflector materials were analyzed named
aluminum sheet, aluminum foil and mirror film to eval-
uate the performance of the parabolic trough collectors.
The absorber tube is the part of the system that converts
solar radiation to heat energy by the working fluid. The re-
Figure 2. Design specifications of parabolic reflector ceiver tube was placed at the focal length of the parabola.
Figure 2 describes the design specifications of a para- As an absorber, a black painted copper pipe was chosen
bolic reflector that has been used in our study. The select- because of its high thermal conductivity than aluminum
ed data of the designed model has the following values as tube or any other plastic tube. Two copper tubes of 0.013m
given by table 1. diameter were used at the focal axis of each collector to
increase water flow rate. All the components of the receiv-

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 Journal of Architectural Environment & Structural Engineering Research | Volume 02 | Issue 03 | July 2019

er tube and parabolic reflector were mounted on a stand The solar water heating system can supply 12-liter hot
which was basically a supporting structure. The accuracy water per day during 5 hr sunshine hour. This rate can be
of the parabolic surface depends on the accuracy of the increased by changing the flow rate or increasing the num-
structure frame. The structure frame supports the rotation ber of units. The test was repeated with different flow rate
axis of the parabolic reflecting surface. To reduce cost, the which is shown in Figure 4. It is observed that the water
structure was made from iron rods which were welded to- temperature is decreasing with increasing flow rate.
gether. A plastic pipe connected the inlet with the storage
Solar Intensity (W/m²) Water Temperature (° C)
tank. The outlet fluid temperature was recorded with the 400 110

help of a thermometer. For the fabrication of the device, 350

100

Water Temperature (°C)

90

Solar radiation (W/m²)

the materials were selected by considering strength, suit- 300
80
ability and local availability. 250 70

200 60

3. Result and Discussion

50
150
40
100
30
75
50 20
70
10:00 AM 11:15 AM 12:20 PM 1:10 PM 2:00 PM
65
Time (hr)
60
Temperature (°C)

55

50 Almuminum foil Figure 5. Variation of solar intensity and temperature with

time (mirror film)
Aluminum sheet
45
Mirror film
40

35 The dependency of the solar radiation on the solar

30
10:00 10:30 11:00 11:30 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00
water heater system was measured by plotting the solar
radiation and water temperature in a single graph which is
AM AM AM AM PM PM PM PM PM

Time

Figure 3. Variation of water temperature with time for shown in Figure 5. It is clearly observed from this graph
different types of reflector that the water heating rate is strongly dependant on solar
radiation. The water temperature is increasing with in-
The solar water heater was evaluated in the month of
creasing radiation and suddenly it falls when the radiation
April to June using a flow rate of 0.2 L/min. Figure 3
goes fall down.
shows the variation of water temperature with time using
different types of reflector. The water coming from a tank 80

(initial temperature was 30°C) was passed through the col- 70

lector and outlet temperature was measured. The data was
taken at the time when solar insolation is available. The 60
Temperature (°C)

reported value indicates the better performance of mirror 50

Inlet
Tube 1
film as a reflector. It gives more stable and high-water Tube 3
40
temperature compared to other reflectors like aluminum Outlet

sheet and aluminum foil. The maximum temperature was 30

68°C at 12:45 PM. This system is capable to provide 50°C 20

and above from around 10:30 AM which is very suitable 10:30 11:30 12:50 13:10 13:20 13:30 13:50 14:00

Time (hr)
for domestic or some commercial purposes also.
65 Figure 6. Variation of temperature in different position of
60
solar water heater with time
Figure 6 shows the variation of temperature in different
Water temperature (°C)

55

50
positions of solar water heating system. Water enters into
the system with tube 1. So, here the tube temperature is
45
quite low. After passing twice back and forth in a single
40
collector, the third tube shows increased temperature and
35 finally, outlet temperature was also monitored and it was
30 almost same as it was found in tube 3. But when radiation
0.2 0.24 0.28 0.32 0.36 is so high, i.e. at the time of middle of the day, the differ-
Flow rate (L/min)
ence of temperature between tube 3 and outlet is visible.
Figure 4. Variation of water temperature for different It indicates the heat gain is very high at the middle of the
flow rates (Mirror film)

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 Journal of Architectural Environment & Structural Engineering Research | Volume 02 | Issue 03 | July 2019

day which is also shown in Figure 7. DOI: 10.1016/j.egypro.2017.03.193

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