Abstract
The reasonable arrangement of the fluid flow layout for heat exchange in the thermal cavity receiver of the parabolic dish collector (PDC) is important and the layout of the heat transfer fluid (HTF) is optimized in this article. A thermal-fluid model based on the tube network (hereinafter referred to as “net-based thermal-fluid model”) is adopted to describe the flow and heat transfer process in the receiver. A comparative numerical example is carried out, and the physical field results predicted by the net-based thermal-fluid model under a uniform heat flux are compared with those of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation to verify the accuracy of the model. Moreover, the former has lower computational cost, which only takes about 1.46 seconds to obtain the physics field. In the optimization example, the inhomogeneous heat flux distribution is applied to the inner surface of the receiver, and the temperature uniformity of the solid region (the standard deviation) is taken as the optimization objective. The genetic algorithm (GA) is used as an optimization algorithm. The optimization results show that the optimized HTF layout improves the temperature uniformity of the heated solid region.
