Prioritization of heat transfer fluids in parabolic trough solar systems using CFD-assisted AHP-VIKOR approach

Parabolic trough solar collectors (PTSCs) are proven technologies and are used in various fields including concentrating solar power, integrated solar combined cycle, industrial process heat, air conditioning, and desalination. The selection of heat transfer fluid (HTF) is a part of the design consideration of concentrating solar technologies (CST) since its technical specifications have a significant effect on the system configuration, operating conditions, and levelized energy cost. Several HTFs including water, thermal oils, molten salts, and gases are already in use for PTSC systems, and others including liquid metals, ionic liquids, and nanofluids are still being tested. Each HTF has pros and cons; thermal and thermodynamic evaluations are practical to compare the performance of an HTF with that of its counterparts however they are insufficient to attribute a parabolic trough CST in terms of design concerns. This study has presented an integrated AHP-VIKOR (Analytical Hierarchy Process - VIekriterijumsko KOmpromisno Rangiranje) multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach assisted by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to prioritize HTFs, particularly for CST and the results are compared to AHP-TOPSIS (Analytical Hierarchy Process - Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) for validation. While AHP is chosen to decide the criteria weights in the multi-criteria process, VIKOR is used as decision making to rank and prioritize alternatives. Water, Therminol VP-1, Solar salt, Hitec, Hitec XL, Liquid sodium, Lead-bismuth eutectic, Carbon dioxide, Air, and Helium are evaluated as the HTF inventory and a comprehensive CFD study is conducted to benchmark their thermal and thermodynamic properties in a high concentration PTSC in terms of solidification temperature, upper thermal stability, collector efficiency, pumping power consumption, receiver temperature gradient, and irreversibilities. In addition, other critical design considerations of HTFs including material cost, heat storage capability, material compatibility, operational safety aspects, operational maturity, and solar field control sophistication are taken into account in the MCDM process. Results show that the current parabolic trough CST should have priority for the HTFs of water and molten salt (Hitec) but molten metals and gaseous fluids would gain more insight in near future. This study presents an original perspective for deciding suitable HTFs in PTSC applications where thermal and thermodynamic analyses are limited.