Research on building-integrated solar thermal collectors is attracting increasingly more interest. Many efforts have been focused at the design level for obtaining specific building-orientated products, but there is a significant lack of standardised methods for evaluating how the efficiency of solar collectors changes when a wall is an integral part of the solar component itself. Generally spe...

Abstract—There was a scenario present day that drying of fresh fruits and vegetables by indirect solar drying by using mechanical device; hence, an effort was made to develop a small scale solar tunnel dryer (STD). Drying of spinach is carried out to analyze the performance of the dryer and to study its drying characteristics. To evaluate the performance of dryer the independent variables were ...

Compared with recirculation and injection modes, once-through direct steam generation (DSG) parabolic troughs are simpler to construct and require the lowest investment. However, the heat transfer fluid (HTF) in once-through DSG parabolic trough systems has the most complicated dynamic behavior, particularly during periods of moving shadows caused by small clouds and jet contrails. In this pape...

This paper describes the application of a non-linear adaptive constrained model-based predictive control scheme to the distributed collector field of a solar power plant at the Plataforma Solar de Almería (Spain). This methodology takes advantage of the intrinsic non-linear modelling capabilities of non-linear state-space neural networks and of their online training by means of an unscented Kal...

A new type of solid state solar cell is produced by using Fe2O3 (working electrode) and SiC as a hole collector (counter electrode). Two molten salts, 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride (EMICl) and 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium iodide (BMII) were used as crystal growth inhibitors with a SiC film. It was found that BMI1 shows about 10 times higher efficiency compared to an EMICl-based SiC film s...

A mathematical model for computing the thermal performance of an air heater with a truncated compound parabolic concentrator having a flat one-sided absorber is presented. A computer code that employs an iterative solution procedure is constructed to solve the governing energy equations and to estimate the performance parameters of the collector. The effects of the air mass flow rate, the wind ...