The rising demand for electricity and heat raises a big challange for the society and engineers. Many products have been introduced to the market to supply more energy to the energy systems. Absolicon AB is a Swedish company that develops and markets a combined heat and power generating product. The product, Absolicon X10, uses a parabolic trough to concentrate the radiation of the sun onto a receiver. The receiveris equipped with mono crystalline solar cells and is cooled by a circulating liquid media.

The energy consumption continues to increase as the use of electronics and energy consuming equipment increases. The use of fossil fuels has to be phased out for this to be sustainable in the long run while the use of renewable energy continues to increase. A renewable energy source is solar energy but the production of heat and electricity are today very expensive compared to other energy sources and an important task for the solar energy market to grow is therefore to minimize the production cost of the solar collectors while increasing its efficiency to produce heat and/or electricity. One way to convert solar energy into heat is by using solar collectors and electricity can be produced by utilizing the produced heat, or by applying solar cells.This thesis aims to recommend a reflective material for the next generation solar collectors from Absolicon and to recommend a commercially available coating for the receiver tube of the solar collector. A market study has been carried out to investigate the cost-related aspects along with the optical and durable aspects for the optical material of the solar collector.