Towards an all Polymeric Solar Collector: An exploratory study

Towards an all Polymeric Solar Collector: An exploratory study

Schöffer, F.

Slaman, M. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

DfS

2010-11-12

Solar thermal energy solutions are facing a slow market penetration because of long economic pay back times of the initial investment. Concerning solar water heating, installation and hardware costs must be significantly reduced to allow for successful market penetration. As an attractive approach to cost reduction, I propose to replace the glass and metal parts of a collector with less expensive, lighter weight polymeric components. The difficulty with using polymers within solar collectors, however, is that high temperatures are reached in which low end polymers would become unstable. To cope with these temperatures, conventional solar collectors are generally build from high temperature resistant materials. These materials are usually expensive, heavy, and have an overall high environmental impact. As such, the research question of the project was defined as;Is it possible to design a polymeric solar collector in order to reduce collector cost price and set the stage for successful market penetration? An optical device was developed which can be integrated within the transparent cover plate of a solar collector in order to limit the maximum temperature. It is this mechanism that makes the use of polymers within solar collectors possible. Such a polymeric solar collector is presented together with a suitable marketing strategy.

solar
energy
collector
sustainable
polymer
optics

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:13d308fa-c8f5-42ea-9fe9-915c06e50b12

2011-11-12

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2010 Schöffer, F.