Performance Improvement of a Solar Air Heater by Using a Temperaure-Based Switching Control Method: An Expeimental Study

Asphalt solar collectors (ASCs) offer a low-cost and reliable alternative to harvest energy from incident solar energy. Asphalt pavements are available infrastructures that can use as an absorber plate to heat flowing air. This paper represents an experimental study to evaluate the effectiveness of a temperature-based switching control strategy in the dynamics and performance of a self-constructed ASC under field conditions. To this aim, a switching controller commands to run and stop the blower when asphalt surface temperature is too low. During the experimental simulations, all the crucial environmental and operational parameters were measured and monitored. The results show that this strategy improves the collector performance by turning off the blower when the absorber temperature is low to heat air. In other words, less energy is consumed by the blower when the collector gains very low thermal energy.

Keywords:

Solar air heater , Switching control method , Experimental study , Asphlat solar collector