Development of a Accelerated Performance Check Procedure for Solar Thermal Collectors
Abstract
The share of automatic productions lines in the manufac turing process of solar thermal collectors is increasing rapidly. Due to this fact, an online procedure to check the quality of the products becomes more and more important. In order to characterise the thermal performance and the quality of solar thermal collectors, testing of these products is required. The assessment of a solar thermal collector requires reliable and universally valid test procedures as the ones documented in the corresponding European standard EN 12975. The disadvantages of such reliable and well established test procedures are the significant cost- intensive infrastructure and manpower, which is needed for performing these time-consuming tests in a standardized way. For these economic reasons the standardized test procedures are not suited for continuous production control. To overcome this problem Solar- und Warmetechnik Stuttgart (SWT) developed a accelerated test procedure, in cooperation with the Institute for Thermodynamics and Thermal Engineering (ITW). This procedure, named QuickSol, is based on the comparison of different pressure time curves of a reference collector determined according to the corresponding standard (e.g. EN 12975-2 thermal performance [1]) to the collector to be tested.