Solar air heating systems with latent heat storage-A review of state-of-the-art

Solar air heating systems (SAHS) are a widely utilized and studied application of solar thermal energy. The integration of thermal storage, especially latent heat storage (LHS), with SAHS significantly reduces the fluctuation in the availability of solar energy. The different designs of SAHS with LHS have been thoroughly reviewed in this article. The integrated collector storage (ICS) and non-integrated collector storage (NICS) type SAHS have been extensively reviewed and their performances have been compared. The effect of various design and operating parameters on the performance of SAHS with LHS have been presented. While the ICS-SAHS has been extensively studied in literature because of their simple design and low cost, the NICS-SAHS provides numerous benefits over ICS-SAHS like less thermal losses during discharging, high thermal storage capacity, and flexibility with better HTF. As a result, the effectiveness of the NICS-SAHS is superior to the ICS-SAHS. It is concluded that for improving the practical applicability of SAHS, more research should be directed towards developing efficient designs of NICS-SAHS.

Automated summary

This article thoroughly reviews solar air heating systems (SAHS) with thermal storage, particularly latent heat storage (LHS). The integrated collector storage (ICS) and non-integrated collector storage (NICS) type SAHS have been extensively studied and compared. The results show that NICS-SAHS outperforms ICS-SAHS in terms of thermal losses, thermal storage capacity, and flexibility with better heat transfer fluid.