AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THERMAL PERFORMANCE OF A TWO-PHASE LOOP THERMOSYPHON (TPLT)-BASED STEAM GENERATOR: EFFECTS OF THERMAL BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

For the Parabolic trough collector (PTC) system, thermal boundary condition of the receiver (or heating section) is important for the thermal optimization. In this work, effects of thermal boundary on thermal performance of the two-phase loop thermosyphon (TPLT) natural circulation PTC system was investigated experimentally. Three kinds of thermal boundary heating conditions (upper and lower half, and whole circular heated) and two filling ratios (FR=0.6, 1.2) were adopted in this paper. The results show that half heating condition can improve heat transfer performance in receiver and system thermal resistance. But the preferred half heating boundary was varied as the filling ratio was changed. However, a lower thermal efficiency was observed for the partly heating boundary conditions. For a low heat flux condition in this work, the effects of thermal boundary on flow instability were not obvious, especially for the bigger filling ratio condition.