Study of a solar water heater using stationary V-trough collector

There are various types of solar water heater system available in the commercial market to fulfill different customers’ demand, such as flat plate collector, concentrating collector, evacuated tube collector and integrated collector storage. A cost effective cum easy fabricated V-trough solar water heater system using forced circulation system is proposed. Integrating the solar absorber with the easily fabricated V-trough reflector can improve the performance of solar water heater system. In this paper, optical analysis, experimental study and cost analysis of the stationary V-trough solar water heater system are presented in details. The experimental result has shown very promising results in both optical efficiency of V-trough reflector and the overall thermal performance of the solar water heater.

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► A stationary V-trough SWH system with the simulated solar concentration of 1.8 suns has been proposed.
► The proposed V-trough SWH with high thermal efficiency can be easily constructed and installed.
► Optical analysis of the stationary V-trough solar collected is presented using ray-tracing method.
► The stationary V-trough SWH can achieve the optical efficiency 70.54% or 1.41 suns and the temperature 85.9 °C.
► V-trough SWH system can be easily constructed with total cost RM 1489.40 and payback period 12.2 year for discounted form.