Paraboloidal dish concentrators need tracking the sun in the east-west and north-south direction continuously throughout the year. But this paper explains the method of intermittent tracking of the sun in the north-south direction with no tracking in the east-west direction for less energy yield. The frequency of tracking in the north-south direction is determined by the relationship between the variation in solar altitude angle and the size of the absorber in the Paraboloidal dish concentrator. A computer program in Visual BASIC is written to enable the detailed calculations of data for the analysis.© 2004 American Institute of Physics.

1.
Manvi
,
R.
,
Fujita
,
T.
,
Gajanana
,
B. C.
, and
Marcus
,
C. J. A. F.
,
1981
, “
Thermal Buffering of Receivers for Parabolic Dish Solar Thermal Power Plants
,”
J. Energy
,
5
, pp.
381
386
.
2.
Dellin, T. A. A. F., 1981, “LINSOL: A Model for Predicting the Otical Performance of Parabolic Trough Solar Thermal System,” Proceeding of the 16th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, Atlanta, Vol. 2, pp. 1746–1751.
3.
Jaffe, L. D., and Poon, P. T. A. F., 1981, “Secondary Concentrators for Parabolic Dish Solar Thermal Power System,” in Ref. 2, pp. 1752–1758.
4.
Steinmann, W. D., and Goebel, O. A. F., 1998, “Investication of the Stationary and Transient Characteristic of Parabolic Trough Collectors for Direct Steam Generation,” International Solar Energy Conference, Albuquerque, NM, USA, pp. 409–416.
5.
Fujita
,
T.
,
Bowyer
,
J. M.
, and
Gajanana
,
B. C.
,
1982
, “
Comparison of Advanced Engine for Parabolic Dish Solar Thermal Power Plants
,”
J. Energy
,
6
, pp.
293
297
.
6.
Duffie, J. A., and Beckman, W. A., 1991, Solar Engineering of Thermal Processes, John Wiley.
You do not currently have access to this content.