Enhancement and thermal performance evaluation of parabolic trough solar collector with the integration of innovative snail porous material

Parabolic trough collector (PTC) is prospective for energy storage compatibility and its thermal performance is limited by weather dependence. It is important to decide the performance of the parabolic trough collector. In this study, the snail shell porous biological material acts as energy storage material integrated with the receiver. These porous materials could store heat and supplies to enhance thermal performance by supplying heat energy to a working fluid during reduced radiation availability. Hence, the experimentation is conducted under two dissimilar flow rate conditions, such as 150 and 300LPH, with and without the porous material receiver. The findings of this research demonstrate that receivers with porous material show superior thermal performance compared to those without porous material. The peak average outlet water's temperature, heat absorption, heat transfer coefficient (HTC), and thermal and exergy efficiency are about 68.7°C, 5312.3W, 357.9W/m2K, 70.6%, and 49.5%, respectively, at 150LPH. However, the efforts of porous material featured parabolic trough collector receiver found optimum thermal performance rather than conventional parabolic trough collector and previous work of parabolic trough collector configured with nanofluid.