Pcms performances impact on flat plate solar collector H2OSS

The solar industry is relatively mature, the cost of these products is stabilized and it is likely to evolve quite slightly over the upcoming years: other than a scale effect resulting from rapid growth markets, only a technological breakthrough in the act of conception, could significantly change the economic level. The following barriers are identified (in order of importance): financial, technical and psychological (the psychological barriers are related with the aesthetics and the rigidity of the architectural codes. The problems, both technical and aesthetic, are the obvious obstacles to the development of this type of systems. For these reasons, in the frame of the present work, a new flat plate solar collector with high building integration and a prototype of this collector were developed. A numerical thermal model, developed in Matlab® environment by using a finite difference model was validated. Then, the model is used to experiment different organic, inorganic and eutectic phase change materials in order to identify the most appropriate PCM for our configutration.