Experimental Study of the Water Heating Performance of a Novel Tile-shaped Dual-function Solar Collector

Solar collectors are widely used in buildings for energy saving. However, the conventional solar collector does not match the tile roof of the building in appearance. To solve this problem, we propose a novel dual-function solar collector with tile-shaped Polymeric Methyl Methacrylate (PMMA) covers to match the roof appearance. This novel dual-function solar collector can provide hot air in winter and hot waterin other seasons, with high annual solar thermal utilization ratio. Experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of the tile-shaped collector. The efficiency of the novel tile-shaped dual-function solar collector varied from 53.2% to 69.1% in water heating mode in the test. The daily thermal efficiency of the water heating system with this tile-shaped collector system varied from 54.0% to 61.8%, while the daily thermal efficiency of the dual-function solar collector with semicircle covers varied from 44.7% to 59.2%, compared with the daily efficiency of the conventional dual-function solar collector without PMMA covers varied from 35.5% to 67.4%. It shows that the tile-shaped collector can greatly integrate the solar collector technology in to the local special feature buildings with slightly decrease of thermal efficiency.