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Concentrated Evacuated Tubes for Solar-Thermal Energy Generation using Stirling Engine
Achintya Madduri Member, IEEE, Denise Loeder, Nic Beutler, Mike He Member, IEEE, Seth Sanders Fellow, IEEE

AbstractIn this study a commercial evacuated tube solar hotwater system was modied to be used as a thermal-power source for a thermodynamic engine. Commercial hot-water systems are meant to operate at temperatures that are close to the boiling point of water. Single-tube non-imaging concentrators were built in order to increase the input solar-radiation per tube and therefore supply thermal-power at temperatures of 180 220 C . Simulations and experiments show that it is possible to use concentrators to increase the temperature range of thermal power extracted from a commercial evacuated tube system and use this modied system to increase the efciency of solar-thermal energy generation. Index TermsSolar-Thermal Energy Generation, Non-imaging Concentrators, Evacuated-tube Solar-Thermal Generators

the solar-thermal collection system, which is generated by the evacuated tube system. Tests were conducted on various topologies using evacuated tubes for increasing the efciency of solar-heat collection.

I. I NTRODUCTION ENEWABLE energy technology will need to address important challenges in order to be adopted at high penetrations in a modern electric grid. These challenges include achieving low enough cost to be economically attractive and mitigating the variability inherent in renewable energy sources, a problem most directly addressed by energy storage. Therefore, there exists a need for an electric generation technology that easily incorporates low-cost energy storage. A Stirling engine based system for distributed generation of electricity is a renewable energy technology that addresses the challenges described above [1]. The proposed system, as shown in Figure 1, is comprised of a passive solar collector, a hot thermal storage subsystem, a Stirling engine for energy conversion, and a waste heat recovery system to implement combined heat and power. The hot-uid storage tank can be implemented with commercially available residential hot-water tanks or with low cost thermal storage uids, such as mineral or vegetable oils. However, synthetic thermal storage uids or phase-change materials (PCMs) can also be deployed in order to achieve higher energy storage density. The system as envisioned would be appropriate for residential solar generation or on a small commercial building scale. The focus of this paper is on achieving high-efciency performance from a commercially available solar hot-water system at temperatures in the range of 180 220 C . It is of particular interest to have a high-temperature input to a thermodynamic engine, because the efciency of a thermodynamic cycle is related to the temperature change, T , between the hot and cold sides of the engine. In this specic case the cold-side temperature of the engine is determined by rejection to ambient Temperature, Tamb . The input temperature is determined by the temperature of the hot supply from

Figure 1. A system representation of a solar thermal electricity generation scheme using a Stirling-cycle engine.

The Carnot efciency can be calculated using equation 1. carnot = 1 Tamb Thot (1)

The heat engine is expected to operate at fraction of the Carnot cycle (Equation 2) [1]. engine = 2 carnot 3 (2)

The total system efciency of a heat engine is dene as the product of the thermal-conversion efciency and the engine thermodynamic efciency (Equation 3). total = thermal engine (3)

A. Evaluation Criteria The evaluation criteria for comparing the performance of unconcentrated evacuated tubes to concentrated evacuated tubes is the power output from an ideal Carnot engine per unit of installed solar-collector area. An insolation level of Qin = 1000 W/m2 is often used as a way to standardize performance metrics for solar-collectors. Since the input insolation is normalized per unit area, it is also informative to normalize the thermal-power output by installed solar-collector area, i.e. report Qout in units of W/m2 as well. By multiplying the thermal-power output, Qout , by the idea Carnot efciency, carnot (Equation 1), one achieves a measure of the theoretical output mechanical power from a solar-powered heat engine per

700 Unconcentrated evacuated tube With concentration ratio A = 2.22 600

500

@ Qin = 1000 W/m2

Qout (W/m2)

400

300

200

100

Figure 2.

A representation of an Apricus evacuated tube system [2].

0 0 50 100 150 200 250 300

T = TabsorberTambient (K)

unit installed solar-collector area. A reason to compare solarcollection systems over the same installed collector area is that the available area is often the limiting factor. While cost of the components is also important, there is not much of a difference in material cost between an unconcentrated and a concentrated evacuated tube system. B. Evacuated Tube System The solar-collector system is comprised of evacuated tube absorbers with non-imaging concentrators to achieve the temperatures required to maximize efcient operation at low cost. A commercially-available evacuated-tube solar-hot-water collection system distributed by Apricus Inc., Figure 2 was used for the experiments described in this paper. The evacuated tube system is a simple technology where thermal-power is collected by a vacuum insulated solar-radiation absorber and transferred to a working uid by a heat-pipe. The evacuated tube absorber has a thermal-power output curve that is shown in Figure 3. The thermal-power output curve is normalized by the aperture area of the evacuated tubes. The industry standard for modeling performance of evacuated tube absorbers is to use a quadratic model shown in Equation 4. Qout = ao Qin a1 T a2 T 2 (4)

Figure 3. Theoretical output thermal-power per unit installed solar-collector area curves of an Apricus evacuated tube system. The red line represents the efciency of the system with concentration. Equation 4 is used with input insolation of Qin = 1000 W/m2 to generate these curves.

C. Non-Imaging Concentrators The foundations of non-imaging optics and concentrators are described in the classical work done by Winston et. al. [3], [4]. The concentration ratio of a concentrator is described as the area of the input aperture to the area of the absorber. The 2dimensional Compound Parabolic Concentrator (CPC) [4], has been shown to have the maximum theoretical concentrationratio, wherein, all rays that fall within the entrance aperture and acceptance angle are reected out from the exit aperture. The 2-D CPC is also described as being an ideal concentrator due to a few other important characteristics: 1) Since the CPC is a non-imaging concentrator there is no need for diurnal tracking. A CPC with an acceptance angle of 56 (a concentration ratio of 1/sin 56 1.21) can accept direct solar radiation for 6-8 hours a day without adjusting for seasonal variation. 2) The performance of a non-imaging concentrator is much better than that of an imaging one in the case of diffuse radiation. This also increases the ability of the solarcollector to perform well over a wider range of weather conditions. 3) The high tolerance of non-imaging concentrators to aberrations is also very benecial in allowing for ease in manufacturing.

For the Apricus absorbers, the model parameters are: a0 = 0.687, a1 = 1.505 W/m2 K , and a2 = 0.011 W/m2 K 2 . The coefcients are normalized such that Qout is in units of thermal-power generated per unit of installed evacuated tube area (W/m2 ). It is necessary to minimize the losses per tube in order to maximize thermal (Equation 3). It is easily possible to increase thermal by increasing the solar radiation input into each tube while reducing the number of tubes usedthe magnitude of the tube loss coefcients (a1 , a2 ) is a function of the number of evacuated tubes used per unit of installation area. A comparison of output thermal-power per unit installed-area of normal evacuated tubes to concentrated evacuated tubes is shown in Figure 3. One concentrated evacuated tube replaces three unconcentrated tubes, therefore, concentrating the solar input to an individual tube while reducing the number of tubes used overall decreases the surface area, thereby increasing the system efciency at T = Thot Tamb > 100 C .

II. T HEORETICAL D ESIGN In order to characterize the effectiveness of using concentrated evacuated tubes as a thermal-power source for a heat engine, single-tube concentrators for the Apricus evacuated tube system were designed and built. A test setup was created to compare the relative performance of concentrated to unconcentrated evacuated tubes. Both the concentrator design and the experimental setup are described in the sections below.

Figure 4. Prole of a CPC with concentration ratio of 3 for a cylindrical absorber [6]

factor of 1.21 3.77 on a per-tube basis. 2) The evacuated tubes are housed in a copper header with xed inter-tube spacing as shown in Figure 2. The design for concentration should be adaptable to the commercial design without major redesign. A concentrator with a 56 acceptance angle is the right size such that every third tube position could be used to hold the concentrated-tubes without unused spaces or overlaps. 3) The height of the concentrators is approximately equal to the the diameter of the collecting aperture divided by the tangent of collecting angle. This leads to a substantial increase in height with decrease in acceptance angle. While it is possible to truncate and still preserve higher concentration ratios, the loss of acceptance angle and hence time-of-day for direct radiation was considered sub-optimal for this experiment. 4) As was discussed above in Section I, the important metric in determining the value of adding concentrators to the evacuated tubes is achieving a greater engine output for the same installed roof-top area of solar-collectors in the case where three unconcentrated evacuated tubes are replaced with one concentrated evacuated tube. The power output for a concentrated evacuated tube system is: ao A Qin a1 T a2 T 2 carnot 3 (5) where A is the solar radiation gain to the absorberi.e. increased solar ux due to a single tube concentrator with acceptance angle of max . The comparison of the normalized power output of a Carnot engine is shown in Figure 6. Based on the comparison, the case for using fewer concentrated tubes and operating at a higher temperature T = 150 + Tamb 180 C is clear for even a concentration ratio of 2.22. (Note: This concentration ratio corresponds to the simulated gain in incident radiation for a CPC with an acceptance angle of 56 as shown below in Section III.) The concentrators were manufactured using a vacuum thermoforming process. Vacuum thermoforming provides accurate plastic shapes that can be coated with a thin layer of reective mylar sheeting. An example test concentrator is shown in Figure 7. Wout = III. S IMULATION S ETUP AND R ESULTS The evacuated tubes were simulated in LightTools using materials that incorporated all the optical properties specied by Apricus Inc. An overview of the optical properties implemented in the simulations can be seen in Table I. A forward 3-dimensional ray trace analysis was used in order to obtain simulated results of the absorbed radiation at the absorber surface. Further, the sun was modeled not only to portray the AM1.5G spectrum of the sun, but also to trace the arc that the sun traces in the sky over the course of a day due to local latitude and time of year. A characteristic day in Phoenix, AZ was chosen to model a day with peak incident radiation of 1000 W/m2 .

Figure 5. Representation of the concentrator used in this experiment. It has an acceptance angle of 56 which translates to a concentration ratio of 1.21

A. Concentrator Design Concentrators for the evacuated tubes were designed based on the ideas from [3]. The main consideration was to design a concentrator cross-section that was meant for the cylindrical absorber architecture. The original CPC is designed for a planar absorber. In order to be suitable for a non-planer absorber, the CPC design has to be adapted [5], [4]. The required modication is to have a section dened by the involute of the absorber surface meet the prole of a CPC. The meeting point of the two proles is where the extreme ray entering a CPC meets the surface of the CPC after one reection. The general prole of a CPC for a cylindrical aperture is shown in Figure 4. The concentrator prole that was used in this experiment is shown in Figure 5. An acceptance angle of 56 concentration ratio of 1.21was chosen for the concentrators. The motivations behind the relatively low concentration ratio were the following: 1) In the normal operating case for the evacuated tubes, the acceptance aperture is equal to the diameter of the tubethe area that is exposed to incident solar radiation. Hence the theoretical gain with a CPC with concentration ratio of 1.21 is an increase of solar radiation by a

150

@ Qin = 1000 W/m2

125

Unconcentrated evacuated tube With concentration ratio A = 2.22

100

Qout (W/m2)

75

50

25

0 0 50 100 150 200 250 300

Figure 8. Picture of 30-tube Apricus hot-water system integrated with a storage tank. The system is setup as a thermosyphon to operate without the need of a pump. The heat transfer uid is Soybean oil.
T = TabsorberTambient (K)

Figure 6. Theoretical comparison of power output from an ideal Carnot heat engine per unit area of installed solar-collectors given an insolation level of Qin = 1000 W/m2 . Equations 1 and 4 were used to generate these curves.

In order to analyze the effect of the highly reective roof of our test site simulations of an evacuated tube without a reective roof-surface were compared to simulations of an evacuated with a representative roof-surface with optical reection properties corresponding to a bitumen roof . For simulating the performance of the CPC, a SolidWorks model with an acceptance angle of 56 (Figure 5) was imported into the LightTools simulation environment. There is a gain-factor of 1.41 in incident solar-radiation due to the radiation reected onto the back of an evacuated tube installed on a highly reective roof. (Note: gain-factor in simulations is a measure of the increase in net solar ux on an absorber over a period of 6 hours centered at midday.) The measured gain-factor of a concentrated evacuated tube in comparison to an unconcentrated evacuated tube with a highly reective roof is 1.57. In comparison, without a reective roof, the measured gain-factor of a concentrated tube in comparison to an unconcentrated evacuated tube is 2.22. The deviation of this gain-factor from the theoretical concentration ratio of 1.2 3.77 can be explained by the variation in the incident angle of solar radiation due to the arc of the sun in the sky. Further deviance from the ideal can be explained by the realistic modeling of the glass cover, the absorber and the CPC wall coating. IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND A NALYSIS A full test system with integrated storage, as shown in Figure 8, was built to measure the performance of a stock 30-tube Apricus solar hot-water system. The heat storage uid was chosen based on a cost and performance basis. The important characteristics desired were low vapor pressure and low viscosity at temperatures in the range of 200 300 C . Due to these considerations, soybean oil was used [7]. Temperature measurements of the uid were made at various points in the system loop. While collecting data for the entire system, it was determined that the thermosyphon dynamics were too complicated to extract an effective comparison of the performance of unconcentrated evacuated tubes to concentrated evacuated tubes. Therefore, for the experimental

Figure 7. Picture of nished single-tube concentrator formed using a plastic thermoforming process and coated with reective mylar.

Component Absorber Cover CPC coating

Material Al/Al-N Borosilicate 3.3 Al Mylar

Ref 0.02 0.04 0.98

Trans 0.02 0.92 N/A

Abs 0.96 0.04 0.02

Table I O PTICAL PROPERTIES IMPLEMENTED FOR THE SIMULATIONS OF THE CPC AND EVACUATED TUBES WHERE R EF =R EFLECTANCE , T RANS =T RANSMITTANCE , AND A BS =A BSORPTION .

data used in this paper, the individual tubes were disconnected from the uid loop. The heat-pipes (Figure 2) of the tubes were connected to thermocouples and were insulated using two inches of berglass sheeting and Al foil, which corresponds to an R-value of 11. The temperature measurements were made with thermocouples placed directly on the heatpipe bulb and underneath the berglass insulationtime-series measurements were collected every 30 seconds for two hours. A. Evacuated Tube Thermal Analysis The dynamics of the individual evacuated tubes are based on the heat balance (Equation 6). The temperature was measured at the heat-pipe bulb since it is the dominant thermal mass of the system. Equation 6 expresses the rate of temperature change of the heat-pipe. 4 = Qin C (T Tamb ) R (T 4 Tsky mtube T ) (6) This model is a simplied version from [8]. The terms in the equation are as follows: 1) C is the conductive loss term (W/ K ), which is mainly from the bulb, where it is not vacuum sealed. 2) R is the radiative loss term (W/ K 4 ), which is primarily from the absorber surface. This is a small term, but becomes important at higher-temperatures. 3) Tsky is the sky temperature that can be derived from the dry bulb temperature and the dew point ambient temperature as follows [8]: Tsky = (sky )0.25 Tamb sky = 0.711 + 0.56 ( (7)

tdp 2 tdp ) + 0.73 ( ) (8) 100 100 4) mtube is the thermal mass of an evacuated tube, which is effectively the thermal mass of the heat-pipe (inclusive of bulb and working uid). The thermal mass was estimated to be mtube = 330 J/ K using a differential mass measurement described in the appendix. 5) Qin is the solar radiation ux (W/m2 ) measure B. Single-Tube Concentrator Performance Multiple experiments were conducted to measure the increase in performance due to the concentrators. The data analysis procedure was to rst use time-series temperature data and extract a plot of T (rate of change of bulb temperature) vs. Tamb . Once T is available, a constrained linear-leastsquares algorithm was used to estimate the model parameters of Equation 6. As can be seen in Figure 9, the extracted model parameters t the time-series data very accurately. Concentration ratio is determined as the ratio of measured increase in solar ux, Qin , extracted from the experimental data. The concentration ratios comparing a concentrated evacuated tube to an unconcentrated evacuated tube on a reective roof (Table II) corresponded very closely to the simulations a gain-factor of 1.57 from simulation results. The average concentration ratio was measured from experimental data to be 1.33, this is based on four experiments conducted in Berkeley, California around the time of maximum solar altitude for each of those days.

Figure 9. Temperature vs. Time and Temperature vs. T for an experiment comparing the performance of an unconcentrated vs. a concentrated evacuated tube. Date July 15th , 2011 July 19th , 2011 (1) July 19th , 2011 (2) July 27th , 2011 Average Measured Concentration Ratio 1.3 1.2 1.4 1.44 1.33

Table II O BSERVED CONCENTRATION RATIO MEASURED AS THE RATIO OF THE ESTIMATED INPUT SOLAR RADIATION FOR CONCENTRATED VS .
UNCONCENTRATED EVACUATED TUBES WITH HIGHLY REFLECTIVE BACKGROUND .

C. Analysis The theoretical concentration ratio for the single-tube concentrators is 1.21 3.77. In experiments, the measured gain-factor in solar radiation input from concentrated evacuated tubes in comparison to unconcentrated evacuated tubes on a highly reective roof was 1.33. As is explained in Section III, where this increase was measured from simulations to be 1.57, the deviation from theory is due to the non-ideal arc that the Sun follows during a day based on local latitude and time of year. Also, there are losses from the non-ideal reective

surfaces of the concentrators used for the above experiments.

V. C ONCLUSIONS The focus of this paper was to characterize the importance of using concentrators for achieving high-efciency solarthermal conversion from a commercial evacuated tube system supplying input thermal-power at temperatures of 180220 C to a heat-engine. As is shown in Figures 3 and 6, the thermal and mechanical efciency of using concentrated evacuated tubes at this temperature range are 35% and 12% respectively. This is based on simulation results of a concentrator with an acceptance angle of 56 over the course of 6 hours in a day with peak insolation of 1000 W/m2 . Experiments with custom manufactured concentrators and a commercial evacuated tube system prove that simulations are accurate and useful in predicting thermal performance of a concentrated evacuated tube system. Both simulations and experiments show that using a concentrated evacuated tube system will convert incident solar radiation to thermal-power more efciently at higher temperatures and therefore increase the mechanical power output from a heat-engine per unit of installed solar-collector area.

Achintya Madduri is a Ph. D. student at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working under Professor Seth Sanders on designing thermal collectors for use in solar-thermal generation and also on developing architecture for smart DC micro-grids.

Denise Loeder is a visiting student researcher from Technische Universtt Mnchen at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is working under Professor Seth Sanders on thermal collectors for use in solar-thermal generation.

Nic Beutler is a visiting student researcher from Technische Universtt Mnchen at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working under Professor Seth Sanders on thermal storage for use in solar-thermal generation.

Seth Sanders is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California - Berkeley. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1989. His research interests are in high-frequency power conversion circuits and components, in design and control of electric machine systems, and in nonlinear circuit and system theory as related to the power electronics eld.

Mike He is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California - Berkeley. He is working under Professor Seth Sanders on Stirling engines for distributed solar thermal electric generation. He is an NSF Graduate Fellow.

A PPENDIX In order to get a measure of the thermal mass of the evacuated tube heat-pipe, a known mass of (600 g ) or (231 J/ K ) of copper was added to a tube in the form of multiple layers of .005 thick copper foil. This copper mass was tightly wrapped around the heat-pipe bulb. Time-series measurements of the temperatures of an evacuated tube with an additional thermal mass and one without were collected with the same input solar irradiance. The temperature data was analyzed to extract the thermal mass of the Apricus evacuated tubes, which was estimated as mtube = 330 J/ K .

R EFERENCES
[1] A. Der Minassians and S. Sanders, Multiphase Stirling Engines, Journal of Solar Energy Engineering, vol. 131, p. 021013, 2009. [2] Apricus Solar Co Ltd., Apricus 30 tube collector: product specications sheet, Jan. 2009. [3] W. T. Welford and R. Winston, High collection nonimaging optics. Academic Press, 1989. [4] R. Winston, PRINCIPLES OF SOLAR CONCENTRATORS OF A NOVEL DESIGN, Solar Energy, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 8995, 1974. [5] A. Rabl, J. OGallagher, and R. Winston, Design and test of nonevacuated solar collectors with compound parabolic concentrators, Solar Energy, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 335351, 1980. [6] R. Winston and H. Hinterberger, Principles of cylindrical concentrators for solar energy, Solar Energy, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 255258, 1975. [7] H. Noureddini, B. Teoh, and L. Davis Clements, Densities of vegetable oils and fatty acids, Journal of the American Oil Chemists Society, vol. 69, no. 12, pp. 11841188, 1992. [8] S. Odeh, G. Morrison, and M. Behnia, Thermal analysis of parabolic trough solar collectors for electric power generation, Proceedings of ANZSES 34th annual conference, Darwin, Australia, pp. 4607, 1996.