Design and Fabrication of Solar Collector Enhanced by Paraffin as Phase Change Medium

The basic resource for all solar energy systems is the sun. If this energy can be effectively harvested, providing the basic energy demand of the world, a clean new world can be formed. Solar collectors capture sunlight and transform radiant energy to thermal energy. The main aim of the work is to design and fabricate a new solar thermal system combining the collector and heat storage at a single unit. Paraffin wax has been selected as PCM for the present application. It is aimed also to check the contribution of adding phase change material to enhance the performance of the system. In this report, conceptual design and detail design of the solar collector that has been developed is presented involving the criteria of geometry selection, material selection, and technical drawings for fabrication. The fabrication process of the prototype development is also detailed out.

The system consists of wooden casing body with good insulation using Rockwool. The transparent medium is double glass cover to allow the solar radiation penetrate to the collector plate. The plate is designed as heat exchanger unit which is copper plate with extended surface (fins) in the wax medium. Water is flowing through the system by two main headers as feeding and discharging header with eight copper pipes connecting them to allow water flow. The 14mm internal diameter header and 10mm diameter internal diameter copper tubes are immersed in the PCM storage unit and the tubes are in perfect touch with the extended surface of the heat exchanger unit to achieve heat transfer to the flowing fluid.