Comparative experimental study on parabolic trough collector integrated with thermal energy storage system by using different reflective materials

The present study focuses on the performance analysis of parabolic trough collector (PTC) incorporated with single-tank thermal energy storage (TES) system with the use of two different reflective materials in PTC which includes glass and high-reflective stainless steel sheet. It consists of TES tank which contains 110 L of Therminol-66 oil (heat transfer fluid). The experiments are conducted for the use of glass reflective material PTC and stainless steel reflective material PTC when both are integrated with TES system. The various performance parameters like useful energy gained by the PTC, energy collected in the PTC, PTC efficiency, heat loss coefficient and the stored amount of energy in TES tank are calculated to know the overall efficiency of the system during daytime. It has been concluded that the use of glass as the reflective material in PTC has better useful heat gain and high average PTC efficiency in comparison with stainless steel reflective material. However, the overall system performance is almost equal to both reflective materials. Silver-coated stainless steel reflective material may be preferred in PTC when it is coupled with single TES tank system, due to cost effectiveness and ease availability with a high-reflective power about 98.9%.