Abstract
The thermal performance of solar air heaters consisting of a porous textile absorber between two PVC foils has been investigated. The efficiency of the heaters depends strongly on the characteristics of the textile forming the absorber and on the back insulation. For an incident solar radiation of 687 W/m2 at the collector's surface, a temperature rise of 16-6°C in the air flowing through the solar collector at a rate of 800 m3/h, was achieved, thus yielding an efficiency of nearly 71 percent. Further it was found that the linear approximation for the Hottel-Bliss equation leads to erroneous estimations for the collector's parameters when the absorber is porous; for the same type of collector with a denser textile as absorber, however, such an approximation yields, as usual, correct numerical values for the characteristic parameters of the collector.
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