Construction and Performance Analysis of a Flat Plate Solar Collector with Parallel Rectangular Tubes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.38032/scse.2025.3.150Keywords:
Solar Energy, Flat Plate Solar Collector, Riser Tube Modification, Thermal Performance, Collector EfficiencyAbstract
This study focuses on assessing how the circular and rectangular tube geometries of absorber tubes influence the performance of flat-plate solar collectors. To enhance the thermal performance of FPC, the traditional circular riser tubes have been replaced with rectangular riser tubes of FPC. Therefore, in present study, two FPCs with circular and rectangular riser tube were constructed and experiments were conducted in similar weather condition at the same time using water as heat transfer fluid and for same mass flow rate, experimental data was collected. The rectangular tube collector provided higher thermal performance than circular tube collector. The maximum efficiency recorded for the circular tube configuration was 55.98%, while the flat plate with rectangular tubes reached about 68.25%. The factor influencing the efficiency increase and thermal performance improvement between the two experimental setup is the higher heat transfer rate due to the increased contact surface area between the riser tube and the flat plate due to the use of parallel rectangular tubes instead of circular ones. In this study, two different FPCs incorporated with circular and rectangular riser tube configurations were both used for collection of inlet and outlet temperature data along with global solar radiation to calculate heat gain, efficiency and compare the results.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Fahim Shahriar, Fahim Tanvir, Adrita Anwar, Md Akib Ul Islam, Md. Hasan Ali (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All the articles published by this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
