Study on Solar Water Heater with Thermal Energy Storage System

Abstract

Abstract

Renewable power supplies are progressively gaining increasing importance in all the nations. Specially, solar electricity, being non-polluting and inexhaustible, has obtained extensive interest among scientists and engineers. Although, there are many advantages, an essential factor is that solar power is time structured power source with an intermittent individual. Consequently, some form of thermal power storage (TES) is necessary for the only usage of this energy supply. Thermal energy can be stored in form of sensible heat or latent heat or combination of sensible and latent heat. The main disadvantage of sensible heat storage systems (SHSs) is low heat storage capacity per unit volume of the storage medium. On the other hand, latent heat storage (LHS) concept, which involves storing and recovering heat through the solid-liquid phase change process, has benefits of high heat loading capacity and isothermal behavior during charging (heat storage) and discharging (heat release) processes. Thermal energy storage, using the latent heat of PCMs has collected considerable attention in the past two decades only. Numerous investigators have studied, theoretically and experimentally, the performance of thermal energy storage employing phase-change materials. In this research work, it was planned to fabricate conventional solar water heater and energy storage tank and also to investigate the feasibility of storing solar energy using phase change materials (PCMs) and utilizing this energy to heat water for domestic applications during night time. The performance of this PCM based thermal energy storage system is going to be compared with conventional sensible heat storage system. The experiment is planning to conduct with different types of flow rates and verify with energy storage time period in the evening hours and also analyse the cumulative heat storage capacity and thermal performance of solar water heater with latent heat storage. The thermal behavior of the LHS system is going to be investigated experimentally for various operating conditions.

Keywords: Fossil fuel, latent heat (LH), phase change material, RTD, sensible heat (SH), thermal energy storage

Cite this Article

S. Ramasamy, T. Louie Frango. Study on Solar Water Heater with Thermal Energy Storage System. Journal of Nuclear Engineering & Technology. 2020; 10(1): 24–36p.