Solar Dish Receiver Designer

Application ID: 42581


Solar concentrator/cavity receiver systems can be used to focus incident solar radiation into a small region, generating intense heat which can then be converted to electrical or chemical energy. A common figure of merit in solar thermal power systems is the concentration ratio, or the ratio of the solar flux on the surface of the receiver or in the focal plane to the ambient solar flux.

This app is a runnable application based on the Solar Dish Receiver tutorial model. In this app, incident solar radiation is reflected by a parabolic dish, while the concentrated solar radiation is collected in a small cavity. A total of six different parameterized cavity geometries are available for investigation: Cylindrical, Dome, Heteroconical, Elliptical, Spherical, and Conical. It is also possible to take several different types of perturbation into account, including solar limb darkening and surface roughness. For each cavity geometry, built-in plots show the flux distribution and concentration ratio in the focal plane as well as the incident flux on the interior surfaces of the cavity.

You can learn more about this example in a related blog post: "Efficiently Optimizing Solar Dish Receiver Designs"

This application example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: