الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Egypt has been making progress in realizing a vision for increasing its investment and energy supply based on renewable energy resources. The solar energy has been progressively used in heating, drying, and electricity generation using photovoltaic cells (PV) recently. One of the solar-based systems is the water solar heater. It has been used many years ago to make hot water available for either residential or industrial sectors. The water solar heater is a simple, easy to maintain, and economic device used to produce hot water by utilizing solar energy. The performance of this heater is indicated by how much useful solar energy in effectively captured and used to heat flowing water. Therefore, studying means to enhance the performance has been the target of many researchers in this field. The current study suggests a strategy to improve the solar heater effectiveness. In order to create a thermal storage medium that can be employed as a preheating technique, the feeding pipe to the solar heater collector is first buried in sand. In addition, the thermal properties of sand are varied by adding additives such as iron and aluminum metal powder, black spray, and disposable oil. A locally–manufactured classic flat-plate water solar heater was installed and coupled with sand storage in Baris City-El Wady El Gadid region. Measurements of solar intensity, ambient conditions, temperatures, and flow rate were daily taken. Five different cases were experimentally studied. The cases cover the proposed idea of using sand storage for water preheating, and means of enhancing thermal storage capacity of sand. The results indicated that as the feeding tube to the solar heater is buried in sand, the performance of the solar heater for water improves. A noticeable enhancement occurs when the sand storage container was covered with a transparent plastic cover. Further enhancement is noticed when additives of metal powder and waste oil are properly mixed with sand. The findings indicated that the flat-plate solar collector’s average daily effectiveness was 43.78 % without using sand storage, which improved to almost 56.41 % with using sand storage for water preheating. The maximum daily average temperature rise of water between entry and exit was almost 30 ℃ for 0.006 kg/s mass flow rate when using this novel idea |