Performance of the Solar Collector with Vacuum Tubes and Dual Heat Pipes Based on Wick Length Variation

Abstract

The increasing number of non-renewable energy and the rising need of energy caused some global issue. We always interested to discuss how human being could create and improve an instrument that can extract energy from renewable energy resources, which is clean and applicable. One instrument that can extract energy from the sun is solar water heater. Solar water heater, consist of two main components. The first one is storage tank, and the other is solar collector. The purpose of this research is to design, manufacture, determine the performance of the solar collector with vacuum tubes and dual heat pipe based on the wick length variation. This experiment used a 150 Watt halogen lamp as the simulator of the sun. A copper fin was utilized to collect heat from the sun and transfer the heat to heat pipes. Adiabatic walls made from Styrofoam and plywood were set to prevent heat transfer to the environment due temperature difference. The performance of the heat pipe was investigated based on the wick length inside the heat pipe. The flow characteristic inside of the heat pipe and the thermal resistance depend on the wick length. The study found that the full-length wick heat pipe has the best performance with 0.37 K/W thermal resistance, and the efficiency of the system reach 34.95%. This is the highest value compared to the half-length and three-quarter length wick heat pipe.