Experimental investigation of thermal performance of an individual heat storage air solar collector

This study experimentally investigates a device for inserting an absorbing plate made of recyclable aluminium cans and spherical Phase Change Material (PCM) capsules into the double-pass channel in a flat-plate Solar Air Heater (SAH). This method substantially improves the collector efficiency by increasing the fluid (air) velocity and enhancing the heat-transfer coefficient between the absorber plate and air. Two types of collectors had been designed as a proposal to use recyclable cylindrical aluminium cans to build absorber plates of SAHs at a suitable cost. The collector had been covered with a 4 mm single glass plate, in order to reduce convective loses to the atmosphere. Two different absorber plates had been designed and tested for experimental study. In the first type (Type I), cans had been staggered as zigzag on absorber plate, while in Type II they were arranged in order. Experiments had been performed for air mass flow rates of 0.03 kg/s and 0.05 kg/s. The highest efficiency had been obtained for Type I at 0.05 kg/s.