Effective solar-thermal collector with uniform concentration

• Sunlight concentration for solar-thermal system operating at high temperature.
• Uniform sunlight concentration receiving pipe by proper reflector was realized.
• All effects that contribute to the uneven concentration were accounted.
• The realized reflector should lead to higher performance of solar-thermal systems.

Solar concentrators are essential to reach high temperatures in solar-thermal applications. The high temperature is required to achieve effective heat transfer between different sections in solar-thermal systems that are utilized to produce electricity from the produced steam. The commonly used parabolic trough and cylindrical reflectors do not provide a uniform concentration on the receiving tube; therefore, in this paper a reflector profile design that uniformly concentrate the sunlight onto the receiver was attempted and was accomplished by solving a second order differential equation numerically. Unlike the parabolic reflector, the proposed reflector was found to exhibit more uniform concentration profile; therefore it is expected to enhance the conversion efficiency and the overall solar-thermal system performance.