"Concentrated solar thermal systems are versatile in view of a wide range of applications such as heating, cooling, and electricity generation. One such system is heliostat based central solar tower system with open volumetric air receiver. This allows achieving a temperature in excess of 1000K using ambient air as heat transfer fluid. The efficiency of such a system depends on the design, materials, concentration factor and air return ratio. In addition, convective and radiative heat loss from receiver reduces its efficiency.
In this thesis, a compound parabolic collector is integrated with an open volumetric air receiver. Therefore, a design of the collector is proposed. Also, the effect of some geometrical aspects viz. length-to-diameter ratio of an absorber and varied gap between them on the heat transfer in open volumetric air receiver is analyzed using a commercial computational fluid dynamics tool.
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