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Ever-increasing impact of burning carbon fuels puts a worldwide trend to shift to renewable energy resources to contribute to a sustainable environment, energy and economy. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technologies are some of the world's most prospective clean technologies for energy and a complete evaluation of the systems is necessary to explore their optimum potential. This study provides a detailed overview of the most common and fundamental CSP technologies: Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC), Linear Fresnel Reflector (LFR), Solar Parabolic Dishes (SPD), and Solar Power Tower (SPT); and analyzes the trend of change in designs to enhance the thermal-hydraulic and optical performance of the collectors. Several design modifications have been applied to PTCs in terms of reflector, receiver, and tracking system while different arrangements of thermal energy storage (TES) systems are being integrated to ensure maximum performance, and modifying TES geometry by inserting fins can enhance the discharge efficiency up to 24%. Primary reflector and receiver are the two most important components of LFRs and modifications techniques including them are showing significant prospects regarding their application on a commercial scale. Evacuated tube LFRs with secondary reflectors deflect up to 90% of incident solar radiation, outperforming cavity receivers. In terms of SPDs, promising design areas include the adjustment and optimization of the concentrator, receiver, engine, and tracking system. Stirling receivers demonstrated 90% effectivity in transferring energy, which is 10% more than Brayton receivers. Optimizing the size and layout of heliostats is necessary for the economical installation of the SPT system. Different combinations of geometry for the liquid, gas and particle-based receiver are in use for SPTs and among them, volumetric gas receivers and particle receivers can achieve temperatures higher than 1000 °C. This article provides the overall design modification trend of CSP technology and compares their effectiveness which can help identify particular areas for increasing the performance of CSP design. Moreover, in the future, the techno-economic viability of deploying CSP can be assessed for pragmatic applications.
Alam et al. (Wed,) studied this question.