Supervisors - Dr. Roberto Ramirez-Iniguez, Glasgow Caledonian University and Tapas Mallick, Heriot-Watt University
PhD Student - Siti Hawa Abu-Bakar, Glasgow Caledonian University
Status - Complete
The project responds to the need to improve solar thermal systems in order to optimise energy efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions. It aims at developing a novel, flexible, highly efficient solar thermal collector system incorporating anidolic optical concentrators capable of increasing the temperature of water at high latitudes during winter time, while avoiding overheating during Summer time.
The PhD student will be responsible for designing, integrating and testing an optimised passive concentrator-solar thermal collector for a wall or ceiling mounted system. Benefits from this research include: optimised water temperature and collector efficiency throughout the year and flexibility of deployment not only on ceilings, but also on south-facing walls at a variety of angles.
The specific objectives of the project are:
- To investigate, design and implement a highly efficient concentrator-solar thermal collector for optimum temperature output throughout the year.
- To investigate the system’s design parameters-performance relationship at different angles of incidence for a variety of locations and orientations on a building.
- To carry out a performance analysis of such a system through simulations and experimental work.
- To investigate the relationship of optical concentration and temperature and the effect that the rest of the system components have on this relationship.