Design, Fabrication and Testing of Solar Spiral Collector with Lenses considering induced vibrational effects

Abstract

Abstract This study was divided into two parts. The first part deals with fabricating, testing and simulating of two scenarios of solar heating water system with spiral collector. The main part of the first scenario includes a traditional spiral solar collector with an area (0.5) m2 while the second scenario includes the same spiral collector integrated with lens. Generally, each scenario consists from storage tank, pump and instrumentation of measurements. The main objective of the first part is to study and analyze the effect of using lens in enhancing the thermal performance of the spiral collector. In order to measure and analyze the thermal performance under the effect of different weather data, the experiments were carried out at the period between 1st December to15th February 2020 from 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM. The experimental results show that the maximum outlet temperature, useful energy, and the efficiency were recorded about 21 oC, 109W and 35 % respectively in the case of spiral collector without the lens. While, in the case of spiral with lens was found to be about 32 oC, 178W and 61 % respectively. As compared between the two scenario, the lens has enhanced the useful heat gain and efficiency of a spiral collector by 72.2 W and 28.4 % during three months. In parallel, the fluent under ANSYS simulation was used to simulate the behavior of the two scenarios of spiral collector. The simulation results show that a good a agreement with the experimental results. On the other side, the second part of the study deals with fabrication and testing a vibration system to measure the natural frequency that take place on spiral pipe due to the effect of temperature and mass flow rate of water. The experimental results of vibration show that the increasing of water temperature and mass flow rate lead to an increase in the frequency and natural frequency due to the kinetic energy of the fluid