I have compared the heating performance of two interesting home built DIY (Do It Yourself) solar collectors: a traditional flat plate collector and a concentrating parabolic trough collector. The tests involved mounting both at the same time in a solar test jig which allows precise aiming of the collectors at the sun's track. Both insulated and non-insulated configurations of each collector design were built and tested. Both solar tracked and stationary mountings were used for the flat plate collector. The concentrating collector requires tracking for it to function.
As a part of the tests, a new approach is presented for making an insulated concentrator collector as an extension of the design presented in my plan book How to build a tracking parabolic solar collector.
This is a work in progress and the entries as written in this blog probably aren't in the best order to read about my testing project. The index below ties together the related posts in the recommended reading order.
If you have a comment or suggestion on the project please leave it here or write me directly. Comments here are moderated for spam.
Thank you for your interest.
George Plhak
george (at) ffwdm (dot) com
[to the gen2 intro and reading list]
4 comments:
Hi George,
You do fine work. Thanks for posting this.
I don't know if the weather was similar enough for this to make sense; can you use your data to compare tracking vs. fixed for the same type collector?
Steve
Excellent attention to detail and thank you for the chronological index.
Apologies for not having the ambient recorded for the first test, it is for the other three comparisons. My recollection of the first and second day was that they were similar, until the second day clouded over.
Thank you for your kind comments.
Hii George, excellent article you shared with us. You described everything easily. Thanks for sharing the article. Keep sharing.
Post a Comment