Air can be passed in contact in contact with black solar absorbing surface such as finned plates or ducts as mentioned above, corrugated or roughened plates of various mater ials, several layer of metal screening and overlapped glass plates. Flow may be straight through, surpentine, above or below or on both sides of the absorber plate, or through a porous absorber material. Basically air heaters are classified in the following two categories. (1) The first type has a non-porous absorber in which the air stream does not flow through the absorber plate. Air may flow above and or behind the absorber plate. (2) The second type has a porous absorber that includes slit and expanded metal, transpired honey comb and over-lapped glass plate absorber. (3) The overlapped glass plate air heater can be considered as a form of porous matrix, although overall flow direction is along the absorber glass plates instead of being across the matrix. Plate and air stream temperature increase gradually along the collector length and across from top to bottom. Thus thermal losses could be significantly reduced. The pressure drop is also significantly less than the non-porous flat-plate absorber design. 3.5 Applications of Solar Air Heaters . The solar air heaters, which supply hot air that could be mainly used for the following processes: (i) Heating buildings (ii) Drying agricultural produce and lumber. (iii) Heating grren houses. (iv) Air conditioning buildings utilizing desiccant beds or a absorption refrigeration process. (v) Using air heaters as the heat sources for a heat engine such as a Brayton or Stirling cycle. 3.6 Advantages of Flat-plate Collectors (i) They have the advantages of using both beam and diffuse solar radiation. (ii) They do not require orientation towards the sun. (iii) They require little maintenance. 23 (iv) They are mechanically simpler than the concentrating reflectors, absorbing surfaces and orientation devices of focusing collectors. 24
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..