Energy, Exergy, and Economic Optimization of Parabolic Trough Solar Collector Operating in Southern Tunisia

Parabolic trough solar collector (PTC) is one of the widely used types of concentrator solar power. Therefore, performance optimization has been a topic of interest in the recent decade. In the present work, energy and exergy efficiencies of a typical PTC as a function of several involving parameters are numerically calculated. The results are compared and validated by other experimental and theoretical studies. Four heat transfer fluids are examined (Therminol_55, Dowtherm_A, Propylene Glycole_1, and Syltherm_800) to select the appropriate fluid that leads to high energy and exergy efficiencies and low-pressure drop. Moreover, two PTCs (PTC1:12.27 m, 5.76 m; PTC2: 6 m, 2.5 m) are compared by keeping the aperture area constant and modifying the module number. It was seen that the PTC 2 had the highest exergy efficiency of 20.86%, the least thermal efficiency of 74.38%, the highest pressure drop of 1324 Pa, and the highest cost of 17,625 $. This study was performed for two different wind speeds.