EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF PERFORMANCE OF SOLAR WATER HEATER BY USING HEAT PIPE
Student of M.E. Thermal Engineering at MIT, Piludara, India
ABSTRACT
Today world is facing challenge of energy crisis. There are many ways of energy wastage in the form of heat in heat transfer applications. It is require recovering these waste heats by some means. The heat pipe is one of the remarkable achievements of thermal physics and heat transfer engineering because of its unique ability to transfer heat over large distances without considerable losses. The present study includes experimental investigation of performance of heat pipe with different working fluids. From that result selection of working fluid for solar water heating application has been done. After that, experimental setup of heat pipe solar water heater is made. From experiments on this set-up, performance of heat pipe solar water heater has been investigated for whole day. From experimental data, analysis and comparison of result with domestic water heater has done. Experimental result shows that heat transfer rate from collector to water tank is large in case of heat pipe collector compared to conventional solar water heater. Thus the efficiency of solar water heater with heat pipe is about 7% more than the conventional water heater.
