Nine parabolic trough power plants located in the California Mojave Desert represent the only commercial development of large-scale solar power plants to date. Although all nine plants continue to operate today, no new solar power plants have been completed since 1990. Over the last several years, the parabolic trough industry has focused much of its efforts on international market opportunitie...

A solar-driven Stirling engine is modelled as a combined system which consists of a solar collector and a Stirling engine. The performance of the system is investigated, based on the linearized heat loss model of the solar collector and the irreverisible cycle model of the Stirling engine affected by finite-rate heat transfer and regenerative losses. The maximum efficiency of the system and the...

As the fossil fuels are depleting continuously, we know that solar energy harvesting is a significant potential area for new research dimensions. Sun provides us about 1.9 x 10 8 TWh/yr on the land, of which 1.3 x 10 5 TWh]/yr energy is used. In order to make much use of solar energy on the earth, solar energy harvesting into more usable form (e.g. heat or electricity) by using solar energy col...

outdoor experiments on a once-through single glazed solar air heater with perforated metal absorber plate were conducted to determine the practical effect of absorber plate porosity as well as suction air flow rate on the collector thermal efficiency and its total pressure drop. three aluminum absorber plates were made perforated by drilling circular holes with different diameter/pitch ratios i...

A solar absorption icemaker was designed. It is an intermittent system and uses Calcium Chloride and Ammonia as absorbent and refrigerant respectively. The single glazed collector/absorber/generator unit uses a plane glass sheet as the outer cover. Overall collector plate exposed area is 1.0m. A thermodynamic simulation of the icemaker has been performed in order to investigate the effect that ...