Abstract
The high cost of equipment and installation of the common metallic flat plate collector type water heating systems (with virtually no energy storage) make them unsuitable for large-scale adoption in the rural areas of underdeveloped countries. In order to popularize solar energy in the rural areas, it is necessary to use indigenous materials, which provide adequate energy storage and are cheap. We perform analyses of a water heater utilizing sand (sand mixed with iron filings) as heat-storage medium. The water heater is discussed in several possible modes of operation: continuous flow, intermittent flow, intermittent constant heat withdrawal, etc. A method is developed to study the system performance when some of the system parameters, such as water flow rate and heat-transfer coefficients, are functions of time. It is shown that, if no heat is withdrawn from the system during daytime, then the system can provide hot water during off-sunshine hours for household needs. The use of a night cover considerably increases the efficiency of the system in those modes of operations where no heat is withdrawn during daytime. When water is drawn only during evening hours, the efficiency increases by almost a factor of three.
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