CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The global energy demand is constantly growing, and predictions indicate that it will be double in 2050 and treble at the end of the century. Nowadays, the development of human life, at least in developed countries, depends on the availability of a large amount of energy obtained by using fossil fuels. The economic world development achieved in the last century was a consequence of the easy access to oil, coal and natural gas which have contributed to increase the environmental pollution and a dangerous global warming. Fossil fuel sources are finite and their availability is not forever. Solar energy is an alternative energy source with a potential to supply the power demanded by all the earth population. The continuously received power, which is called incident solar radiation, provides a total energy of more than 100 million times the total energy used by the humanity in a year. Different solar thermal systems are used for electricity production, all of them concentrate the incident solar energy and reflect it to a point or a line where a receiver with a suitable heat transfer circulating fluid removes the solar heat, then the fluid is led to a heat exchanger where its heat is transferred to water or steam which is used to move a turbine and to produce electricityIn the present work a modelling of a parabolic collector is done using the software Tonatiuh Ray Tracer, which bases its operation on the use of the Monte Carlo method to irradiate the surface under study with a determined amount of photons at random. Then the program prints a series of impact files produced by these particles on the surface, according to the parameters given and the optical modelling selected. The output of the program is then analyzed using Matlab, the binary data are read and then a mathematical analysis of the set of impacts is performed