Thermal Load Analysis of a Solar-Thermal Flat-Plate Collector in a Domestic Heating System

摘要

Considering the significantly increased costs for aluminium and copper that are at present primarily used in the solar-thermal flat-plate collector design, polymeric materials show a remarkable potential for cost reduction. Apart from moderate material costs especially for commodity plastics, highly efficient production processes provide an interesting prospective for the use of polymeric materials. However, several technological challenges have to be met prior to the use of polymeric materials in a wide range of applications for collectors. This is especially the limited thermal property of various polymers in comparison to copper, aluminium or glass. Focussing on the evaluation of the thermal loads on the components of a flat-plate collector, an experimental analysis in combination with a simulation study of a modern state-of-the-art collector is carried out considering the following aspects: maximum temperatures of the collector components, dynamic behaviour of thermal loads and accumulated exposition times, i.e. thermal load profiles. Both the in-situ field-testing and the calculations show high thermal loads for the absorber and moderate temperatures for the other collector parts.