Experimental Study on Performance Test of Serpentine Flat Plate Collector with Different Pipe Parameters and A New Phase Change Collector

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the thermal performance of serpentine pipe flat plate collectors with different pipe diameters and pipe spacings was tested by experiments. On this basis, two phase change materials with high melting point (70 °C) and low melting point (15 °C) were laid on the upper and lower parts of the pipeline to enhance the frost resistance and high temperature resistance of the collector. The experimental results show that under strong solar radiation conditions, high-melting phase change materials can absorb a lot of heat when the water temperature of the collector is high, thereby slowing down the water temperature rise and avoiding overheating, and when the collector is cooled, phase change can be effectively utilized to slows down the rate of temperature drop of the collector, so as to achieve reasonable utilization of the overheating of the collector; in the low temperature environment, the low melting point phase change material can significantly reduce the cooling of the collector and improve the frost resistance of the collector. The placement of the two kinds of different melting point phase change materials was investigated, and the results show that the low-melting phase change material under the pipe is more conducive to the collector antifreezing. However, for the hot regions, the high-melting phase change material placed at the top of the pipe is more conducive to preventing overheating.