A Review on Performance Improvement in Solar Flat Plate Collector
As non-renewable energy sources like fossil fuels are getting rare; cost of energy production has become higher as well as the involvement of environmental pollution by burning of fossil fuels among the developed and developing nation. Solar energy is most vastly available energy and very effective in terms of energy conversion. Conversion of solar energy into thermal energy is the simple and most used method. The efficiency of solar thermal conversion is around 70%. Solar water heating systems are mostly suited for its simple operation and maintenance. Many research papers acknowledge the improvement on thermal efficiency of solar water heating systems resulted in techniques to improve the convection heat transfer. This review paper summarizes the previous works on solar water heating systems with various heat transfer enhancement techniques contain solar energy collector design, coating of pipes, fluid flow rate, insertion of twisted tapes and dual purpose solar collector (DPSC). This paper also discussed the methods to optimize and simulate the solar water heating systems to understand flow and thermal characteristics in solar collectors that would lead to the improvement of the thermal performance of solar collectors.