Design and experimental analysis of a static 3-D elliptical hyperboloid concentrator for process heat applications

• The experimental analysis of a static 3-D EHC prototype has been presented.
• The performance of EHC studied for different experimental conditions.
• The experimental study has also been carried out to estimate outlet temperature.
• The flux distribution on the receiver for the EHC configuration has been presented.

This paper presents the design and experimental analysis of a static 3-D solar elliptical hyperboloid concentrator (EHC) for process heat applications. The 3-D static elliptical hyperboloid concentrator is designed to accept a wide range of incidence angles (±30°) and has a concentration ratio of 20× for medium temperature applications (100–150 °C). Ray tracing analysis has been used to obtain, the solar flux distribution on the receiver aperture plane for the EHC configuration. The optical efficiency has been obtained theoretically using OptisTM, a ray tracing program and optimisation has been carried out, before the design of the EHC was finalised and experimentally tested. The experiments were carried out for different conditions to study the performance of EHC. The experimental study has also been carried out to obtain the inlet and outlet temperature of a fluids supplied to a coil heat exchanger solar receiver.