Modelling, Simulation and Identification of Heat Loss Mechanisms for Parabolic Trough Receivers Installed in Concentrated Solar Power Plants

This paper describes a thermodynamic model library developed with the object-oriented language Modelica, which is both implemented for steady-state and transient heat transfer analyses of Parabolic Trough Receivers (PTRs) installed in Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants. For the identification of PTR heat loss mechanisms, this heat transfer model is coupled to a derivative-free hybrid optimization routine developed in Matlab, combining a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm with a Nelder-Mead Simplex (NMS) algorithm with search space boundary constraints.