Thermal Analysis of a Solar Concentrating System Integrated with Sensible and Latent Heat Storage

Abstract The scarcity and the up scaling cost of fossil fuels have forced everyone to look out for an alternative sources of energy. Most of the process heat requirements of industries fall in the temperature range of 125-350 0C where solar concentrating collectors can meet most of the requirement. One of the most common problems that solar power generation systems face is the gap that exists between the availability of the solar resource and energy demand, causing the need for an effective method by which excess heat collected during periods of high solar irradiation can be stored and retrieved later for use at night or during periods of darkness. The literature survey indicates that considerable amount of work in the area of thermal energy storage is concerned with either sensible heat storage system or latent heat storage systems only and not much reported on the combined sensible and latent heat storage systems. Moreover, very limited attempts are made in the high temperature actual solar concentrating systems of considerable size. The purpose of this work is to investigate experimentally the thermal analysis of the concentrating solar system with sensible (without phase change material, PCM) and latent heat energy storage system. A 16 m2 solar concentrating collector was used for this purpose. A heat exchanger was designed and fabricated to house the phase change material. A thermic fluid was pumped into the system via solar concentrator. The experimental results in the form of charging efficiency and overall efficiency with latent heat and without latent heat storage (only sensible) were presented. During the discharging experiments it was observed that the combined system performs much better than the mere sensible storage type system without phase change material for latent heat storage.