Experimental Study on the Heat Exchanger Performance of Parabolic Trough Solar Water Heater

This paper introduces a new type of solar water heater——Parabolic trough solar water heater,the biggest feature of the solar water heater is that the parabolic trough reflector can reflect light onto the tube with reflective principles,which may lead to lots of advantages,such as more strong solar energy flux density,fewer losses,fewer tubes used.In a word,the cost is reduced while the performance is guaranteed.On this basis,we built a collector area of about 1.54 square meters of parabolic trough solar water heaters bench and made experiments to test.Instantaneous average efficiency and daily average efficiency of the water heater can be calculated.Efficiency curve can also be generated.Meanwhile we measured the heat loss coefficient of the water heater.The results showed that the daily average efficiency of the parabolic trough concentrating solar collector is between 30% and 50%,while at higher temperatures the collector showed its good insulation properties.