DOI: https://doi.org/10.14710/ijred.2021.33213

Design and Performance Evaluation of a Multi-Temperature Flat Plate Solar Collector

1Department of Mechanical Material and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Nottingham, Malaysia

2Department of Mechanical Engineering, Federal Polytechnic Mubi, Adamawa State, Nigeria

Received: 30 Sep 2020; Revised: 27 Jan 2021; Accepted: 25 Feb 2021; Available online: 12 Mar 2021; Published: 1 Aug 2021.
Editor(s): Soulayman Soulayman
Open Access Copyright (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Centre of Biomass and Renewable Energy (CBIORE)
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Abstract

The standard flat-plate solar collector utilises a single copper tube to remove the absorber plate’s heat. This type of collector’s primary purpose is to provide hot water for a single application. Hot water can be required for different applications at different temperatures. Besides, using the standard collector’s configuration may increase thermal demand and increase the collector’s size. Therefore, this study proposes a novel solar water heating configuration that uses three in-line fluid passages. The goal is to design a single collector that provides hot water for various uses: Sterilisation, washing, and postnatal care. Thus, the proposed system was modelled, and a numerical simulation conducted. This analysis compares the proposed system’s output and the standard collector’s output. The results showed that the thermal load demand was reduced by 27% when the hot water demand for these services was generated using three separate tanks. The serpentine collector’s efficiency with three fluid passages is increased by 20% compared to the traditional serpentine collector. The thermal energy delivered to meet load was 30% higher than that of the traditional serpentine system. The experimental and simulated system performance is in near agreement with an average percentage error Cv(RMSE) of 8.75% and confidence level NSE of about 87%. Since the proposed serpentine collector has a higher overall thermal production, it is recommended for use with hot water, which has to be heated to different temperatures.

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Keywords: Solar water heater; serpentine collector;TRNSYS simulation; collector efficiency and solar fraction

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Section: Original Research Article
Language : EN
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