Using parabolic trough solar collectors as a means of renewable electricity generation is increasing. However a main barrier to significant adoption lies in the initial investment cost. In light of this, much work has been invested into improving efficiency or reducing the materials required for construction. These two objectives tend to compete against each other when considering the wind load on a collector. This work implements an optimisation work flow utilising Kriging surrogate models to investigate the impact of gap sizes on both the optical efficiency and wind loading on a trough collector. It is found that the introduction of a mirror gap does appear to have a positive influence, both on the rotation moment fluctuations and lift loads. However, the exact quantification of this impact could not be determined. The ordinary Kriging models used in this work, appeared to be insufficient to capture the full model with the given number of test points. It is recommended from this work that in future a more complex universial Kriging methodology be used for such problems and more test points formed potentially using a more simple simulation. The implemented NSGA-II multi-objective optimisation algorithm does appear to provide suitable results based on the Kriging models from which its objective evaluations are calculated. The final Pareto front mostly maximises both the horizontal gap and vertical gap, although does enter into the domain for a horizontal gap of roughly 0.215.     «

Using parabolic trough solar collectors as a means of renewable electricity generation is increasing. However a main barrier to significant adoption lies in the initial investment cost. In light of this, much work has been invested into improving efficiency or reducing the materials required for construction. These two objectives tend to compete against each other when considering the wind load on a collector. This work implements an optimisation work flow utilising Kriging surrogate models...     »