Design and Testing of Solar Power Heating

Abstract

The use of non-renewable energy sources continues to impact the society’s ability to minimize its environmental footprint and impedes the efforts to slow down climate change with stark implications to the global economy, humanity’s own well-being and even existence. The importance of this topic is illustrated by the constant presence in the news as well as support for broad efforts to identify and perfect alternative sources of energy. The use of renewable energy sources, such as water, wind, or solar continues to grow, however challenges in efficient energy production and storage remain. The sun’s emanated energy constitutes one of the most readily and widely available renewable resources. Yet, converting it to usable energy still requires expensive equipment such as solar panels. This poster investigates the design of solar heating of liquids as a means for improving the energy transfer. While solar water heaters have been used for decades, improvements in design have not kept up. Various aspects, such as the heater design and coating as well as the addition of salt to the water were considered as part of the experiments for this project. In my work, I posed the hypothesis that heating salty water is more efficient than regular water because the salt would make it harder for the heat to escape. The solar heater followed a classic box design with the liquid circulating through a transparent tube inside the box and connected with a container in a closed loop system. As it heated, the liquid would travel upwards through the tube towards the container. When the water travelled into the box, it would heat up and rise outside of the box. Experiments that controlled both the light intensity and other environmental parameters (such as outside temperature) showed that the use of salt in water results in speeding up the heating process. The experiment showed, not only that the heater was successful, but also that adding a saline quality to the water would in fact make the water heat up faster and be more practical. This could be immensely practical in use at a larger size and while the increase may seem small, this could be a big part in helping eliminate the use of fossil fuels in at least one of the many sectors involving them.