Parabolic trough solar technology is the most proven and lowest cost large-scale solar power technology available today, primarily because of the nine large commercial-scale solar power plants that are operating in the California Mojave Desert. However, no new plants have been built during the past ten years because the cost of power from these plants is more expensive than power from conventio...

Nine parabolic trough power plants located in the California Mojave Desert represent the only commercial development of large-scale solar power plants to date. Although all nine plants continue to operate today, no new solar power plants have been completed since 1990. Over the last several years, the parabolic trough industry has focused much of its efforts on international market opportunitie...

Among the renewable sources of energy, solar energy offers a practical solution for the energy problem which is clouding the prospects of mankind. The present paper deals with the experimental investigation of parameters of a solar parabolic trough in winter conditions and to obtain optimum process parameters by Grey Relational Analysis. The experiments were planned using Taguchi’s L9 orthogona...

This study describes a simulation analysis to asses increased productivity of salterns used for sea salt production by implementing a solar parabolic trough collector to accelerate the evaporation process. The proposed system is designed for Southern Spain, to be coupled with a heat exchanger submerged in the saltern’s channel. A thermal-fluid analysis of the proposed system was modeled using E...