Experimental performance evaluation of a parabolic dish solar geyser using a generalized approach for decentralized applications

Solar water heating is one of the established technologies with several designs. However, the use of deep parabolic dishes for continuous water heating is limited. This paper explores the use of a stand-alone manually tracked parabolic dish solar water geyser (PDSG) to generate hot water in domestic and small commercial places instantaneously. For this purpose, a solar geyser is tested for its thermal performance using three different flow rates and two configurations of the truncated cone receiver (a hollow coil). Next, optical analysis of a PDSG is performed using the ray-tracing method. Following, a generalized approach/method is suggested for the performance evaluation of a PDSG. The experimental results show that the proposed solar geyser can instantaneously generate hot water of sufficient temperature (~50–60 °C) for immediate consumption. Lastly, to gain insight into the economic aspects of the proposed PDSG, the Levelized cost of heat (LCOH) and water heating (LCWH) are determined and compared. The results reveal that a decrease of ~2.7% and ~1.1% in the LCOH and LCWH, respectively, is possible with the proposed PDSG with an epoxy coated receiver and glass cover compared to the PDSG-non coated receiver for the flow rate of 20 kg/hr, respectively.