Analytic optical design of a Linear Fresnel solar collector with variable parameters

This paper describes a design method to study the impact of linear fresnel solar collector (lfsc) geometry on its efficiency. the proposed approach is based on an optical modeling using a combination of both ray tracing and monte carlo method to evaluate the influence of the geometric parameter variation on the solar energy collected on the receiver,and to simulate the influence of loss mechanisms. therefore,for a unit of lfsc with 50 m length and a receiver width of 1 m,the optimum gap should be 10 cm in order to minimize blocking and shadowing effects,the number of mirrors stripes should be in the range of 9 rows on each side. in addition,given the solar flux distribution on the receiver surface,its width could be reduced from 1m to 0.6 m consequently the receiver surface is also reduced to 30 m2. hence,the optimized prototype has a concentration ratio of 37.5 %,an intercept factor of 0.795 and its optical efficiency is about 0.74. once all geometric parameters are selected,it was necessary to study the optical behavior of the primary mirror field under typical tunisian meteorological conditions. a database of meteorological station installed in southern tunisia is used to calculate thermal flow transferred to the working fluid from the sunrise to sunset. the optical efficiency varies from 0.4 in winter to reach 0.7 in summer,thermal flow generated increases from 350kw to 718.27kw. © 2017,university of mohammed premier oujda morocco.