Performance Simulation and Optimization of Cylindrical Mirror Spliced Parabolic Trough Solar Collector

This paper proposes a new type of solar trough collector with cylindrical mirror spliced and develops a new ray tracing method to predict and optimize its performance. The mirrors of this system are composed of multiple cylindrical mirrors whose centres are on a parabola and the normal vector of the centers of each cylindrical mirror is consistent with the normal vector of the parabola point where it is located. This paper compares the cylindrical mirror spliced trough solar system with the conventional parabolic trough system and finds that the influence of cylindrical spherical and coma aberration can be reduced to negligible levels by adjusting the system design. At the same time, the slope error and cost of the cylindrical mirror is much less than the parabolic mirror so it has better performance from numerical simulation. On the vernal equinox, the net efficiency of the cylindrical mirror spliced system using a cavity receiver is 22.39% higher than that of the conventional trough system using vacuum tube receiver. The cylindrical mirror spliced system can be further optimized to achieve an annual net efficiency of 60.2% in the north-south horizontal axis tracking mode.