Design and development of a low-cost solar parabolic dish concentrator system with manual dual-axis tracking

Solar parabolic dish attracts most of the researchers with its higher concentration ratio and its modular ability. Parabolic dish concentration can be employed in many applications which falls under solar thermal and solar electricity production. This article presents a novel approach of designing and development of a low-cost solar parabolic dish concentrator of 12.6 m(2) aperture area with dual-axis manual tracking, which can be utilized for process heating and electrical power generation simultaneously. The same set up has been fabricated in National Institute of Technology, Puducherry and ready for investigation and analysis on different prospective. The design concept of solar parabolic dish concentrator and dual-axis tracking system and its economic analysis are elaborately discussed in this article. The complete procedure followed for the fabrication of the entire system is also highlighted. Based on the economic analysis it was found to be more economical than the other existing dish concentrators in the literature, which costs (sic)6877.00 per square meter.