New Design of a Solar Collector Reflector

In this research paper, a new theoretical approach for designing and simulating the optical performance of a solar reflector is presented, increasing its intercept factor and hence its efficiency. In order to achieve this, a special computer code was developed using MATLAB. After that, the result of this approach is to be compared with conventional reflectors (flat and circular shaped reflectors). In comparison, the new r at the specified dimensions has showed a huge improvement over the flat reflector where the maximum intercept factor has been around 97% for the designed reflector and about 84% for the flat one, while it has slightly exceeded the elliptical reflector by 4%. On the other hand, the max intercept factor for both the circular and the designed reflector has been almost the same. If the reflector width range falls within the range 5-11 cm, the designed reflector shows a larger intercept value than the circular one and above 11 cm the contrary occurs, noticing that the elliptical reflector intercept value significantly falls below those values for those two reflectors.