Category: Designing and Modeling Solar Energy Systems

Simulations are powerful tools for solar energy systems design, offering a number of advantages, as outlined in the previous sections. However, there are limits to their use. For example, it is easy to make mistakes, such as assuming wrong constants and neglect important factors. As with other engineering calculations, a high level of skill and…

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are widely accepted as a technology that offers an alternative way to tackle complex and ill-defined problems. These systems can learn from examples, are fault tolerant in the sense that they are able to handle noisy and incomplete data, are able to deal with non-linear problems, and once trained, can perform…

In this chapter so far, we have seen simple methods that can be used to design active solar energy systems of standard configuration using f-chart and other solar processes with the utilizability methods. Although these methods are proven to be accurate enough and possible to carry out with hand calculations, the most accurate way to estimate…

The utilizability design concept is useful when the collector operates at a known critical radiation level during a specific month. In a practical system, however, the collector is connected to a storage tank, so the monthly sequence of weather and load time distributions cause a fluctuating storage tank temperature and thus a variable critical radiation…

In the previous section, the f-chart method is presented. Due to the limitations outlined in Section 11.1.5, the f-chart method cannot be used for systems in which the minimum temperature supplied to a load is not near 20 °C. Most of the systems that cannot be simulated with f-chart can be modeled with the utilizability method or its enhancements. The utilizability…

The f-chart method is used for estimating the annual thermal performance of active building heating systems using a working fluid, which is either liquid or air, and where the minimum temperature of energy delivery is near 20 °C. The system configurations that can be evaluated by the f-chart method are common in residential applications. With the f-chart method, the…