Development and performance evaluation of 0.16 m² solar point thermal energy collector compared with flat plate collector

Abstract

Renewable energy systems such as wind, solar and biomass are significantly more land intensive than traditional fossil fuels. Renewable energy increases diversity of energy supplies and can replace diminishing fossil fuel resources over the long run; their use in place of fossil fuels can substantially reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Application of solar energy for domestic and industrial heating purposes has become more popular. In this paper, reduced land use of flat plate collectors for same output with solar point collector is analysed. However the effectiveness of presently used flat plate collectors is low due to the moving nature of the energy source. So the performance of solar flat plate collector is effectively improved by using a novel system called solar point collector. Also an attempt has been made to compare the performance of flat plate collector with that of solar point thermal energy collector by conducting experiments. Experiments were conducted for a week during which the atmospheric conditions were almost uniform and data was collected both flat plate collector and solar point collector for various flow conditions.