Optical and thermal comparison between ordinary and mirror blades reflector for solar parabolic trough collector

For technical and economic reasons the realization of a parabolic trough concentrator prototype seems very difficult, this is due to the parabolic form of mirror, mention that there are two solutions that can be made, using a reflective sheet where the disadvantages of it are low reflectivity quality and short life, the second solution is the use of mirror blades placed on a parabolic shaped support. In this work we try to understand the difference between mirror blades concentrator and ordinary parabolic concentrator trough. We make an optical and thermal simulation of two concentrator types. For the optical simulation we use TracePro software, we suppose that the concentrators are oriented directly towards the sun and the irradiance value is 1000 w/m². For the thermal simulation we use TRNSYS software, we simulated the two concentrators throughout the year in the Ghardaia region in Algeria. The results showed that there is a difference between the two concentrator types due to deformation of the concentration line, causes a decrease of concentration factor and subsequently a decrease of captured useful energy.