Design and Development of an Innovative Flat Plate Solar Collector

Over the past few years, considerable progress has been made in reducing the
energy consumption for space heating. This is mostly achieved by using the energy
conservation and traditional solar technologies. Solar collector has already been
designed but innovation can be made to the current design to make it perform better and
reach a very low level of energy consumption. The efficiency of the existing solar
collector is on the lower side because of solar losses from the absorber plate to the
surrounding and a major part of absorbed energy is lost to the sky because of the
radiation and convection losses from top of the absorber plate.
With the transparent insulation technology such as transparent honeycomb, the
performance of the solar collector can be improved. The prototype would be use to
make an experiment evaluating the new design effectiveness in improving the flat plate
performances. The addition of transparent honeycomb insulator would suppress the
connection current between absorber plate and glazing, thus reducing the top convection
losses, without much affecting the heat gains.
This report contains Introduction which explains the project background,
problem statement, and limitations of the project. Literature review contains the study of
flat plate collector, transparent insulation technology and the transparent honeycomb.
Methodology discussed the procedures involved in doing this project and the Gantt chart
for the project. Results & discussion contain the design parameter that has been taken
into consideration for the project, calculation made for the prototype, the design of the
prototype with results from experiments. Conclusion was made based on what have
been learnt from the report, recommendation for the project and lastly references used
throughout the project.