Modeling parabolic troughs in Energy3D

Fig. 1. The absorber tube of a parabolic trough

A parabolic trough is a type of concentrated solar collector that is straight in one dimension and curved as a parabola in the other two, lined with mirrors. Sunlight that enters the trough is focused on an absorber tube aligned along the focal line of the parabola, heating up the fluid in the tube (Figures 1 and 2). If the parabolic trough is for generating electricity, the heated fluid is then used to vaporize water and drive a turbine engine. A power plant usually consists of many rows of parabolic troughs.

Fig. 2. A view from the absorber tube.

Parabolic troughs are another common form of concentrated solar power (CSP), in addition to solar power towers that Energy3D has already supported (there are two other types of CSP technologies: Dish Stirling and Fresnel reflectors, but they are not very common). According to Wikipedia, there are currently more parabolic trough-based CSP plants than tower-based ones.

In the latest version of Energy3D (V7.0.6), users can now add any number of parabolic troughs of any shape and size to design a solar thermal power plant.

Fig. 3: Parabolic troughs at different times of the day

Parabolic troughs are most commonly aligned in the north-south axis so that they can rotate to track the sun from east to west during the day. This kind of trackers for parabolic troughs works in a way similar to the horizontal single-axis tracker (HSAT) for driving photovoltaic solar panel arrays. You can observe their motions when you change the time or date or animate the movement of the sun in Energy3D. Figure 3 illustrates this.

Like photovoltaic solar panel arrays, parabolic troughs have the inter-row shadowing problem as well. So the distance between adjacent rows of parabolic troughs cannot be too small, either. But unlike solar power towers, parabolic troughs do not have reflection blocking issues among mirrors. Figure 4 shows this.

This new addition greatly enhances Energy3D's capability of modeling CSP plants, moving the software closer to the goal of being a one-stop shop for exploring all sorts of solar solutions. In the coming weeks, we will start to build 3D models for parabolic troughs in the real world.

Fig. 4: Inter-row shadowing in parabolic trough arrays