Thermal Performance of Plastic Receiver in Solar Collector

A plastic tubes used as absorber of active flat plate solar collector (FPSC) for heating water were studied numerically and experimentally. The set-up is located in Babylon (republic of Iraq) 43.80 East longitude and 32.30 North latitude with titled of 450 toward the south direction.  The study involved three dimensions mathematical model for flat coil plastic absorber which solved by FLUENT-ANSYS-R.18 program. Experiments were conducted at outdoor conditions for clear days on January and February 2018 with various water volume flow rates namely (500, 750, 1000, 1250, and 1500 Liter per hour LPH) on each month for Reynolds number range of (1 x 104 to 5 x 104) through the receiver. The experimental results showed improvement in absorber input - output temperature difference, collector efficiency, and water storage temperature; the maximum input - output temperature difference is 3.1 °C, the maximum collector efficiency is 79%, and the maximum water storage temperature is 67 °C. The comparison validates a good agreement between the numerical and experimental results at variable operation conditions with maximum deviation of 4.2%. Also the experimental results were compared with previous study for similar condition and gave a good improvement.