The transport characteristics of concentrated solar radiation in volumetric receiver

The physical and mathematic model of foam volumetric absorbers associated with dish solar concentrator was set up, where the foam material was treated as the independent scattering particle system. The Mie scattering theory was employed to describe its scattering properties and the integrated transporting process of the concentrated solar radiation from the dish concentrator was simulated by the Monte Carlo ray-tracing method (MCRT). The distribution of absorbed solar energy per unit volume in volumetric absorber was obtained and analyzed. The results show that most of the incident solar radiation is absorbed at the bottom of the receiver. The foam parameters pay significant effect on the penetrating distance of the sunlight, and the heat source becomes homogeneous gradually with the porosity or the pore diameter increasing. By the investigation, some valuable reference was presented for the design of solar energy receivers.