Solar Parabolic Trough collectors are commonly used to harness the solar power for power generating applications involving high temperatures. In the given paper study we have made use of the SolTrace software which uses the Monte Carlo algorithm for finding out the radiation received on the absorber tube of the collector. The computational study was performed taking into account the solar radiation received at Vellore city in India (12.92oN, 79.13oE) as on 16th February 2013. Further a 3D model of the absorber tube used in the parabolic trough collector was created and meshed with the help of the Ansys Gambit software. The absorber tube which we considered for our study is made up of Stainless Steel AISI 302 material. The meshed model so created was then exported to the Ansys Fluent 6.3 software and simulations were performed for different mass flow rates of the fluid. The fluid which we used in the computational analysis study is Therminol 55. The temperature differences for different mass flow rates of the liquid passing through the absorber tube were found out and based on the temperature rise contours plots so obtained, we have plotted the surface heat transfer coefficient for the absorber tube. We also found out the static temperature contour plot for the fluid flowing through the given absorber tube taking into account the heat flux acting on the absorber tube due to the hourly and daily average solar radiation.
Worldwide fossil fuel resources such as crude oil, natural gas, coal are decreasing at an alarming rate due to the increasing demand for the fossil fuels across the whole world. More than 75 % of the total crude oil consumed in India is imported from foreign countries. The demand for diesel oil in India is increasing at a staggering rate of 7.5 % per annum. The Indian economy is therefore widely affected by the increasing prices of the diesel oil as most of the heavy vehicle transport in India is run on the diesel engines. So in regards to the present energy crisis and environmental concerns relating to the use and depletion of fossil fuels, the alternative fuel of Biodiesel is gaining importance worldwide as a substitute fuel for diesel in vehicle engines. Due to the increasing dependency of the country on the fossil fuel imports, the Government of India has also made concerned efforts in this regard and launched various ambitious national and state level programmes to promote the biodiesel production and usage in the past decade or so. The recently announced 'National Policy on biofuels' of India (2009) has marked a blending target of 20 % for the biodiesel fuel with that of the conventional diesel fuel by the year 2017. In spite of all these efforts taken by the government in the past decade, the development of the biofuels production sector has been rather slow in India. India is still to attain the 5 % biodiesel blending target that was proposed to be achieved by the year end of the
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