Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Elliptical heat pipe flat plat solar collector was designed, constructed and tested with a collector tilt angle of 11° to the horizontal. Experimental analysis of the effect of condenser length/evaporator length (L_c/L_e) ratio of the heat pipe, different cooling water mass flow rates and different inlet cooling water temperature were analysed. Five numbers of elliptical heat pipes with stainless steel wick has been fabricated and used as transport tubes in the collector. Copper tube has been used as container material with methanol as working fluid of the heat pipe. These heat pipes were fixed to the absorber plate of the solar collector and the performance of elliptical heat pipe solar collector has been studied and results were compared. It has been found from the experimental trials that the elliptical heat pipe solar collector having L_c/L_e ratio of 0.1764 achieved higher instantaneous efficiency.

Keywords: Heat pipe, flat plate solar collector