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Optimal passage size for solar collector microchannel and tube-on-plate absorbers

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-09-22, 10:14 authored by Roger Moss, Stan Shire, Paul Henshall, Philip Eames, Farid Arya, Trevor Hyde
© 2017 The Authors Solar thermal collectors for buildings use a heat transfer fluid passing through heat exchange channels in the absorber. Flat plate absorbers may pass the fluid through a tube bonded to a thermally conducting plate or achieve lower thermal resistance and pressure drop by using a flooded panel or microchannel design. The pressure drop should be low to minimise power input to the circulating pump. A method is presented for choosing the optimum channel hydraulic diameter subject to geometric similarity and pumping power constraints; this is an important preliminary design choice for any solar collector designer. The choice of pumping power is also illustrated in terms of relative energy source costs. Both microchannel and serpentine tube systems have an optimum passage diameter, albeit for different reasons. Double-pass and flooded panel designs are considered as special microchannel cases. To maintain efficiency, the pumping power per unit area must rise as the passage length increases. Beyond the optimum pumping power the rise in operating cost outweighs the increase in collector efficiency.

Funding

The authors are grateful to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for funding this work as part of a collaborative programme between Warwick, Loughborough and Ulster universities, reference P/K009915/1, EP/K010107/1 and EP/K009230/1.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Solar Energy

Volume

153

Pages

718 - 731

Citation

MOSS, R. ...et al., 2017. Optimal passage size for solar collector microchannel and tube-on-plate absorbers. Solar Energy, 153, pp. 718-731.

Publisher

© The Authors. Published by Elsevier

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

2017-05-09

Publication date

2017-06-20

Copyright date

2017

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

0038-092X

Language

  • en