Installation and Performance Testing of Solar Air Heater for Office Heating

A widespread development has been occurred in the technologies exploiting the solar energy for diverse purposes at the beginning of the 21st century, thanks to awareness of the people regarding the environmental issues. One of these purposes is to supply heating to the buildings from sun. A Double-Flow/Glazed V-corrugated Plate Solar Air Collector (D-F/GVCPSAC) is considered as an effective design that can be used for this purpose. The principal aim of the present work is to investigate the performance of D-F/GVCPSAC which is intended to be used in an office for space heating during winter in N. Cyprus. The performance investigation has been carried out both numerically and experimentally. The office space that is intended to be served by the collector is the Mechanical Engineering Department Chairperson office (MEDC Office). The load of the target office has been evaluated by using the Energy Plus building simulation program as 4546W. The thermal performance of a D-F/GVCPSAC is investigated by developing the governing equations and solving them by Matlab program and concurrently carrying out real time monitoring of the collector under the same environmental conditions. It is aimed to obtain the temperature of each element of the collector, the useful heat output, the thermal efficiency, the number of collector and the corresponding area that is necessary to supply the load, as well as comparing the numerical and experimental results. It is revealed that, there are minor discrepancies between the simulation and experimental results regarding some parameters, whereas in some others the discrepancies are at significant level. It is found that the nine collectors with 16 m2 are required to supply the target load for the real case (monitoring) and six collectors with 10 m2 for simulations.