Design Criteria Optimisation for Solar Space Heating Systems
Abstract
During the past decade, energy consumption growth has closely paralleled economic activity. In addition to this growing demand for energy, consumers are demanding increasingly flexible, convenient, and clean energy forms. The focus of a sustainable energy future has been towards the energy demand sector. The building sector particularly consumes one third of total Iran energy. This paper is concerned with the optimization of some design criteria for water based active solar space heating systems intended for residential applications. For this purpose, a system model based on has been used to correlate the performance and cost effectiveness of the system with a number of key design criteria. Two design criteria are investigated in the present study, namely the collector to floor area criterion which relates the collector area to the building floor area, and the collector to load criterion which relates the collector area to the building thermal load. The simulation results showed that the system is not viable when compared with a diesel oil alternative. The system is cost effective when compared with electricity. Solar heating is cost effective for a size of 0.3 m2 of collector per m2 of building floor area. For a cross check calculation, the designer could use the CAL criterion which is 0.5 m2 of collector per GJ of building heating load.