Enhancement of Thermal Performance of Parabolic Trough Collector Using Cavity Receiver

In the present work, the use of rectangular perforated fins in a V cavity absorber tube has been studied for the enhancement of the thermal performance of the solar parabolic trough collector system. Four different cases of fin geometries have been considered, and numerical analysis has been done to study the laminar flow and heat transfer characteristics of the absorber tube. The continuity, momentum, and energy equations have been solved by using commercial software package. The fins with the perforation diameter of 4 mm and pitch ratio of 22.1 show the maximum heat transfer. The optimal case shows the maximum value of thermo-hydraulic performance as 1.049, and the increase in Nusselt number is 1.3 times as compared to a smooth absorber tube.