In this work, we propose an evaluation method to identify departures from a parabolic trough solar collector (PTSC) with respect to a homemade prototype. It is convenient to divide the detection plane into equal circular areas and consider the centroid for a tiny bundle of rays in the center of each area, so by using a backward ray-tracing, we find exact equations to design object patterns that are projected onto a PTSC to produce by reflection a uniform and predefined pattern onto the detection plane. The object pattern is displayed in a liquid crystal display forming a set of bright spots on a complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor sensor after being reflected by the surface under test. The discrete sampling guarantees the correspondence between the image and object points. We carry out the surface reconstruction by means of a deterministic iterative algorithm that uses the vector field of the normal vectors to obtain the surface shape under test. To prevent the misalignments of the measurement system from affecting the results, we propose a simple method for calibrating the orientation and position of each element that forms part of the experimental setup. Finally, we recovered the radius of curvature of a fast PTSC prototype with a percentage error of around 0.48%.
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