Experimental Study of a Rectangular Storage Solar Collector with a numerical analysis

Abstract

In this article, a practical and numerical assessment was accomplished on a rectangular storage collector to be used for household purposes. This design can be utilized as a water reservoir to substitute the classical reservoirs generally utilized in Iraq to achieve two goals are heating and storing water together. The experiment shows that the maximum temperature rise through this collector was about 10.5 °C at 3 p.m. An experiment with a continuous flow of working fluid was also conducted. Experiment results show that the outlet water temperature of 28 °C is reached about 1 p.m. and diminished after this time. Performance results showed that the ratio of sunlit area to storage volume is an important parameter affecting the performance of this design of integrated solar collector. This ratio should be more than 12 to provide a suitable amount of warm water in the winter season. The performance of the rectangular storage collector was, broadly, identical to the performance of the classical solar heaters. The free convection phenomenon in the enclosure of the rectangular collector was investigated by using the Fluent program. There is a good correlation between the Fluent data and the experimental results obtained from the experiments.