Design and Experiment of a Concentrating Transpired Air Heating System

This paper presents the physical design and experiments of the Concentrating Transpired Air Heating (CTAH) system as a combination of subsystems of parabolic primary and circular secondary reflector that concentrates incident solar radiation onto an inverted perforated absorber. Optical efficiency of the CTAH system has been analysed using a 2D ray tracing model. Experiments have been carried out for 50% perforated black painted aluminium inverted absorber for glazed and unglazed systems. Results show a significant temperature rise of the absorber surface in both cases. The maximum temperature of the absorber for the unglazed system is 52.1°C at 22.5°C ambient temperature, where as for the covered system, it is 67.9°C at 23.2°C ambient temperature.