Abstract
Seasonal solar thermal energy storage (SSTES) has been investigated widely to solve the mismatch between majority solar thermal energy in summer and majority heating demand in winter. To study the feasibility of SSTES in domestic dwellings in the UK, eight representative cities including Edinburgh, Newcastle, Belfast, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, London and Plymouth have been selected in the present paper to study and compare the useful solar heat available on dwelling roofs and the heating demand of the dwellings. The heating demands of space and hot water in domestic dwellings with a range of overall heat loss coefficients (50 W/K, 150 W/K and 250 W/K) in different cities were calculated; then the useful heat obtained by the heat transfer fluid (HTF) flowing through tilted flat-plate solar collectors installed on the dwelling roof was calculated with varied HTF inlet temperature (30 °C, 40 °C and 50 °C). By comparing the available useful heat and heating demands, the critical solar collector area and storage capacity to meet 100% solar fraction have been obtained and discussed; the corresponding critical storage volume sizes using different storage technologies, including sensible heat water storage, latent heat storage and various thermochemical sorption cycles using different storage materials were estimated.
Highlights
Around 29% of energy in the United Kingdom in 2015 is consumed by the domestic sector, which represents the second largest proportion of final consumption, surpassing the industrial sector (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, UK, 2016)
The useful solar thermal energy gained by the heat transfer fluid (HTF) flowing through the used solar collector can be much less than the solar irradiance projected on the collector surface
The method to determine the useful heat gained by the HTF flowing through a tilted flat-plate solar collector is given in Appendix A mainly adopted from literature (Duffie and Beckman, 2013)
Summary
Around 29% of energy in the United Kingdom in 2015 is consumed by the domestic sector, which represents the second largest proportion of final consumption, surpassing the industrial sector (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, UK, 2016). The domestic sector is the most responsive to fluctuations in temperatures as about 80% of household final energy consumption is for space and water heating (Palmer and Cooper, 2013). Large scale seasonal solar thermal energy storage (SSTES) system using water as storage medium has been demonstrated in Germany (Mangold and Schmidt, 2009; Fisch et al, 1998) and Denmark (Fisch et al, 1998). These systems store solar heated hot water in tank, pit, borehole or aquifer layer for district heating system, and the storage volume is from hundreds cubic meter to more than ten thousands cubic meter. The critical values of solar collector area, storage capacity and the volume of heat storage system to achieve 100% solar fraction were calculated for dwellings with different overall heat loss coefficients
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