NEW DESIGN OF LINEAR FOCUS SOLAR COLLECTOR FOR MODERATE TEMPERATURE THERMOSOLAR ENERGY RECEIVERS

In the context of the solar thermal industry, parabolic trough technology (PTCs) is the one that arouses the most commercial interest due to its technological maturity and the reduced risk to be assumed by investors in its implementation. Currently, cavity receivers are an excellent alternative for solar thermal systems for process heat, but the conventional design of a receiver, with a vacuum ring, is designed to operate with temperatures greater than 300ºC in the heat transfer fluid. This entails an increase in the complexity of the design, which entails a considerable increase in production costs, as well as a penalty in their durability due to some inherent aspects of their design. This means that they are still expensive and not very robust, since their optical and thermal properties tend to degrade over time. Therefore, more robust receivers are necessary, that without requiring the most vulnerable and expensive elements existing in current systems, acceptable levels of thermal and optical losses can be guaranteed. The present invention describes a new collector with a linear focus analogous to the PTCs currently existing in electricity generation plants. By means of a new geometry of the primary reflector and a new cavity receiver, an alternative is provided for systems that operate in a moderate temperature range (<300ºC), as is the case of solar thermal systems that provide process heat.