International Journal of Engineering and Technology

An evacuated tube solar collector using therminol D-12 as heat transfer fluid coupled with parabolic trough is studied in this paper. An experimental set-up was constructed to study the performance of evacuated tube collector with therminol D-12 as heat transfer fluid. The parabolic trough is coupled with evacuated tube collector for better performance. In the traditional solar collectors water is used as heat transfer fluid. The problems in using water as heat transfer fluid are addressed in detail in this paper. The temperature characteristics of heat transfer fluid and water in the storage tank and the heating efficiency are determined under various conditions. The efficiency of therminol based evacuated tube collector coupled with parabolic trough is 40% more than that of water based evacuated tube collector coupled with parabolic trough. This study projects the potential of therminol based evacuated tube solar collector coupled with parabolic trough in the instant hot water generation.