Field Study of the Performance for a Solar Water Heating System with MHPA-FPCs

In this paper, the thermal performance of a large-scale solar water heating system(SWHS) with flat plate collectors based on microheatpipe array (MHPA-FPCs)ispresented. The systemwas built to provide hot water for dishwashing in a university cafeteria in Beijing, China. The thermal performance tests for the system were conducted at different conditions.The field trial data were analyzed from the aspects of different solar irradiation, ambient temperature and initial temperaturesin water tank.Test results show that more solar irradiation, higher ambient air temperature and lower initial water temperature could achieve higher system efficiency. The daily system efficiency could reach 62% with large solar irradiation and small temperature between the collectors’ temperature and the ambienttemperature. Under different conditions, the average system efficiency approached 50%.The test results present excellent characteristics for the large-scale SWHS with MHPA-FPCs.A large number of worthy experimental dataare got from this paper, which can serve as an important basis for understanding the field operation of large-scalenovel MHPA-FPC SWHS.