Design, Manufacturing, and Performance Evaluation of Building-Integrated Asymmetric Compound Parabolic Concentrator Solar Evacuated Tube Collector with Concentric Tube Heat Exchanger
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Date
2023-10
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The amount of thermal energy consumed in buildings has increased due to the rapid development of urbanization. In most cases, high-rise buildings have a small ratio of available roof area to the required solar collector area to generate thermal energy. A wall-mounted Asymmetric Compound Parabolic Concentrator (A-CPC) solar evacuated glass tube collector with a concentric tube heat exchanger is designed to boost the solar energy collection for building thermal energy supply. The geometric profile of A-CPC was computed from the standard CPC geometry using solar altitude angles. TracePro and ray-tracing program, were used to predict the collector's optical efficiency. The collector's performance was evaluated using an experimental method in real-world conditions. The optical simulation result shows that, within the range of the solar altitude angle, the highest optical efficiency was around 73% and the average optical efficiency was around 58%. From the experimental result, the average instantaneous thermal efficiency for experiment-1, experiment-2, and experiment-3 was 51.2%, 52.86%, and 53.03%, respectively. Taking systematic and random error into account, the maximum uncertainty of instantaneous thermal efficiency was found to be 6.0%, 5.95%, and 5.94% for experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively. The findings of this study shows that the A-CPC based collector performance is superior (by 1.63%) and has a high efficiency in comparison to other research studies being conducted in the field. Furthermore, the outcomes shows that, contrary to popular perception, solar collector integration on building walls at low latitude countries is viable and should be taken into consideration.
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Keywords
Building-Integrated, Compound Parabolic Concentrator, Ray-tracing, A-CPC, Thermal efficiency