Theoretical and Experimental Study of an Air Solar Collector with an Evacuated Tube Cover

Theoretical calculations and experimental data on an evacuated tube solar collector with an air heat transfer medium are presented. The collector is a conventional flat plate design except that the front cover, instead of being made up of one or two sheets of flat glass, consists of a raft-like arrangement of evacuated glass tubes. The calculations indicate that an evacuated tube cover, together with a high heat transfer absorber, could give a solar collector with superior thermal performance. Experimental measurements are given for an air collector using uncoated evacuated tubes and a screen absorber. Results on internal temperatures are used to infer the effectiveness of the heat transfer between the absorber screen and the air flow. When account is taken of the measured absorber properties, the performance of the evacuated tube cover is in reasonable accord with the theory.