Solar Thermal Collector And Phase Change Material Heat Exchanger

This master thesis constructed a device to investigate the advantages of the combination of two solar thermal power technologies. One of them is the flat plate solar collector with forced air ventilation, which main application can be found in residential buildings where the demand for hot water has a large impact on energy bills, in places where the frequent use of laundry washing represent one of the mayor needs and space heating in building that are located off-grid or if utility power is subject to frequent outages. The second is the PCM heat exchanger such device is mainly composed of a hydrated salt (calcium chloride Hexahydrated), which was set up inside glass tubes and it was use as thermal storage material. The use of expensive high consuming components was avoided for this design instead it was design to work in base to the convection principles making it simple, versatile and friendly environmental. Tow solar collector design with different absorption plate material were tested:for the first model galvanized steel with a thickness of lmm was use like absorption plate material such material have a thermal conductivity of18w/m-k, as for the second model a holed steel plate with a thickness of2mm was use like absorption plate this last one have a thermal conductivity of16w/m-k. As a complementary part of this work and because thermo solar collector technologies have been employed, it is necessary to construct a tracking system. In this work one axis simple tracking system has been built by using simple electronic and mechanical components. Its mechanical part consists of frame holding the flat plate collector in place together with the chassis and a design that was think to be set up onto a wall and which height position can be adjusted manually if necessary. At the same time, this arrangement gave to the model the axial mobility needed, powered by an electric low power consuming step motor which manages the focusing movement of the concentrator. The step motor is controlled by an electronic circuit mainly governed by a PIC microcontroller. The entire tracking system is powered by a battery that is being constantly recharged by a photovoltaic cell, making the prototype independent and versatile as it features its own power source. The experiments performed by the above described prototype show that solar energy gather by the tow kind of solar collector with an effective collecting area of120cm in length and50cm in width could be enough to provide and adequate indoor temperature for crop cultivation in side green house.