New selective coating materials are developed and used in advanced solar collector and absorber designs with improved efficiency. Cobalt and Copper sulfides nanoparticles are high interest for absorbers of solar thermal collectors due to their optical properties and high absorptance in the solar wavelength range (> 96%). In the present work, Cobalt and Copper sulfides nanoparticles were synthes...

Relative to solar water heaters, solar air heaters have received relatively little investigation and have resulted in few commercial products. However, in the context of a humidification-dehumidification (HDH) desalination cycle, air heating accounts for advantages in cycle performance. Solar collectors can be over 40% of an air-heated HDH system’s cost; thus, design optimization is crucial. Be...

Direct solar absorption has been often considered in the past as a possible solution for solar thermal collectors for residential and small commercial applications. A direct absorption could indeed improve the performance of solar collectors by skipping one step of the heat transfer mechanism in standard devices and having a more convenient temperature distribution inside the collector. Classic...

Solar thermal collectors represent a widely used type of system for the conversion of solar energy. In order to produce selective coatings on aluminium substrates to be used as absorber plates in high efficiency solar collectors, nickel pigmentation was applied to anodically oxidised surfaces. Electrochemical dc methods are used to study the oxidation of aluminium as functions of the following ...

This article presents a transient model of a solar adsorption cooling system. A computer program has been developed to simulate the operation of a two bed silica gel- water adsorption cooling system as well as flat plate collectors and the hot water storage tank. This program is then utilized to simulate the performance of a sample solar adsorption cooling system used for cooling a set of r...

Concentrating solar collectors of low concentration ratio can supply hot water or process heat at intermediate temperatures, i.e. 80 to 180 C, where flat plate collectors are not effective, and for which there are a number of industrial, domestic and rural applications. This paper studies the potential applications of this technology and presents case studies to prove its feasibility.

Research on building-integrated solar thermal collectors is attracting increasingly more interest. Many efforts have been focused at the design level for obtaining specific building-orientated products, but there is a significant lack of standardised methods for evaluating how the efficiency of solar collectors changes when a wall is an integral part of the solar component itself. Generally spe...

The objective of this research is to achieve a high solar fraction in social housing, for which investment costs are strictly limited. Six houses have been built in the east of France: two with active (solar collectors) and four with passive (Trombe walls) solar heating systems. Two types of transparent covers are compared: a capillary structure and a simpler polycarbonate plate. The project wa...

PVT collectors produce both electricity and heat from the same area. PVT collectors with low concentration factor allow both stationary and tracking configurations. For stationary or single axis tracking, the daily variation in the solar incidence angle can cause significant shading in concentrating collectors. Shading has a larger impact on PV than on thermal collectors and thus the evaluation...