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Entransy analysis on the thermal performance of flat plate solar air collectors

  • Research Article
  • Building Systems and Components
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Abstract

Based on the thermo-electric analogy (the so-called thermal entransy analysis), the unified airside convective heat transfer coefficient for different sorts of flat plate solar air collectors (FPSACs) is identified in terms of collector aperture area. In addition, the collector thermodynamic characteristic matching coefficient is defined to depict the matching property of collector thermal performance between the collector airside heat transfer and the total heat losses. It is found that the airside convective heat transfer coefficient can be experimentally determined by collector thermal performance test method to compare the airside thermal performances of FPSACs with different types of airflow structures. Moreover, the smaller the collector thermodynamic characteristic matching coefficient is, the better the thermodynamic perfect degree of a FPSAC is. The minimum limit value of the collector thermodynamic matching coefficient is close to zero but it can not vanish in practical engineering. Parameter sensitivity analysis on the total entransy dissipation and the entransy increment of a general FPSAC is also undertaken. The results indicate that the effective way of decreasing total entransy dissipation and enhancing the useful entransy increment is improving the efficiency intercept of the FPSAC. This is equivalent to the cognition result of thermal analysis. However, the evaluation indices identified by the thermal entransy analysis can not be extracted by singular thermal analysis.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Project in the National Science & Technology Pillar Program during the twelfth Five-year Plan Period (No. 2013BAC17B02), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51506193), China Scholarship Council (CSC No. 201504910177) and special fund for the development of small and medium enterprises (part of the EU cooperation) (SQ2013ZOG100002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Solar Thermal Energy and Photovoltaic System, Institute of Electrical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Jie Deng & Ming Yang

  2. Department of Building Science, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Xudong Yang & Yupeng Xu

Authors
  1. Jie Deng
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  2. Xudong Yang
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  3. Yupeng Xu
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  4. Ming Yang
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Correspondence to Jie Deng.

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Deng, J., Yang, X., Xu, Y. et al. Entransy analysis on the thermal performance of flat plate solar air collectors. Build. Simul. 10, 193–202 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-016-0326-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-016-0326-z

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