Analysis of Cylindrical Cavity Receiver for Different Heat Losses

The heat losses are mainly affects on the performance of cavity receiver of solar concentrator. In this paper, the experimental and numerical study is carried out for different heat losses from cylindrical cavity receiver of 0.35 m cavity diameter and 0.55 m opening diameter with wind skirt. The total and convection losses are studied experimentally to no wind conditions for the temperature range of 60 °C to 80 °C at 0°, 25°, 50°, 75° and 90° inclination angle of cavity receiver .The experimental set up mainly consists of cylindrical cavity receiver which is insulated with glass wool insulation to reduce the heat losses from outside surface.. The numerical analysis was carried out with Fluent Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, to study connective heat losses for no wind condition. The numerical results are compared with experimental results and found good agreement with maximum deviation of 13%. The effect of inclination angle of cavity receiver on total losses & convection losses shows that as the inclination angle increases from 0o to 90o, both losses decreased due to decreased in convective zone into the cavity receiver. The effect of operating temperature of cavity shows that as the temperature of cavity receiver increases, the total and convective losses goes on increasing. The present results are also compared to the convective losses obtained from M. Prakash. The convective loss from M. Prakash shows nearest prediction to both experimental and numerical results.