Field study of the performance for a solar water heating system with MHPA-FPCs

In this paper, the thermal performance of a large-scale solar water heating system (SWHS) with flat plate collectors based on micro heat pipe array (MHPA-FPCs) is presented. The system was built to provide hot water for dishwashing in a university cafeteria in Beijing, China. The thermal performance tests for the system were conducted at different conditions. The field trial data were analyzed from the aspects of different solar irradiation, ambient temperature and initial temperatures in water tank. Test results show that more solar irradiation, higher ambient air temperature and lower initial water temperature could achieve higher system efficiency. The daily system efficiency could reach 62% with large solar irradiation and small temperature between the collectors' temperature and the ambient temperature. Under different conditions, the average system efficiency approached 50%. The test results present excellent characteristics for the large-scale SWHS with MHPA-FPCs. A large number of worthy experimental data are got from this paper, which can serve as an important basis for understanding the field operation of large-scale novel MHPA-FPC SWHS. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).