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Constant temperature induced stresses in evacuated enclosures for high performance flat plate solar thermal collectors

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posted on 2016-02-10, 12:04 authored by Paul Henshall, Philip Eames, Farid Arya, Trevor Hyde, Roger Moss, Stan Shire
A flat-plate solar thermal collector’s efficiency can be much improved if the enclosure in which the solar absorber is housed can be evacuated. This would result in a high performance, architecturally versatile solar thermal collector capable of supplying clean energy efficiently for use in applications including residential hot water and space heating. This paper focuses on the design of evacuated enclosures for flat-plate solar collectors, in which the solar absorber is completely surrounded by a thin layer (4–10 mm) of thermally insulating vacuum, resulting in a thin solar thermal collector (depth < 20 mm). The expectations, requirements and applications of these solar collectors are discussed along with a description of the enclosure concept under consideration. Potential seal materials are identified and their limitations examined. Finite element modelling results are presented of a study investigating how the glass cover of such enclosures are mechanically stressed when subject to atmospheric pressure loading and differential thermal expansion of dissimilar components. Finite element model predictions are validated against preliminary experimental strain measurements for existing experimental enclosures. It is demonstrated that with a suitably low temperature sealing process vacuum the designed enclosure can successfully withstand imposed stresses.

Funding

This project was supported by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council within the High Performance Vacuum Flat Plate Solar Thermal Collector for Hot Water and Process Heat project [grant number: EP/K009230/1].

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Research Unit

  • Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST)

Published in

Solar Energy

Volume

127

Pages

250 - 261

Citation

HENSHALL, P. ... et al., 2016. Constant temperature induced stresses in evacuated enclosures for high performance flat plate solar thermal collectors. Solar Energy, 127 (April), pp.250–261.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-01-18

Publication date

2016-02-09

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Model and experimental data discussed in this work can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2016.01.025

ISSN

0038-092X

Language

  • en

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