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Solar Energy 97 (2013) 19–25
www.elsevier.com/locate/solener

A study on a flat-plate type of solar heat collector with an

integrated heat pipe
Lingjiao Wei a,b, Dazhong Yuan a,⇑, Dawei Tang a, Bangxian Wu a
a
Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
b
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Received 7 November 2012; received in revised form 9 May 2013; accepted 22 July 2013
Available online 29 August 2013

Communicated by: Associate Editor Brain Norton

Abstract

An improved structure of flat-plate solar heat collector applied in construction of the solar water heater system is proposed in this
paper. The collector uses one large integrated wickless heat pipe instead of side-by-side separate heat pipes. High stability and leak avoid-
ance between the water cooling side and the solar heating side are the main advantages. The present work includes three aspects. Firstly,
an experiment was conducted to test thermal performance of the new collector on July 9, 2011. After a daily work from 09:00 to 16:00,
the maximum collector efficiency could reach 66%, while the temperature of water of 200 kg in the storage tank increased by about
25.0 °C in the end. Secondly, a theoretical analysis on the energy balance for each component of the collector was made to understand
the heat transfer process inside the collector. Thirdly, a transient heat transfer model has been developed to calculate the collector effi-
ciency, temperatures of water, the glass cover and the absorber plate, of which the simulation results are qualitatively in agreement with
the experimental data.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Integrated heat pipe; Solar heat collector; Solar water heater

1. Introduction
Conventional solar heat collectors display some short-
comings, in which the forced or natural circulation system
is adopted for transferring the heat captured by the solar
heat collector. The water may freeze in cold days; a pump
is needed to maintain the forced circulation; the heat loss
due to the natural convection and radiation from the col-
lector surface is considerably large; and the working life
of the collector may be shortened due to the pipe corrosion.
With the development of advanced heat transfer technol-
ogy, heat pipes with high transfer rate which results of a
continuous evaporation and condensation process of pure
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel./fax: +86 10 8254 3146.
E-mail address: yuandz@iet.cn (D. Yuan).
working fluid are now widely applied in the design of solar
heat collectors.
On the basis of applying heat pipes, numerous experi-
ments have been conducted to optimize the thermal perfor-
mance and the stability of the solar water heater. Nada
et al. (2004) designed a two-phase closed thermosyphon
solar collector with a shell and tube heat exchanger. The
influence of the cooling water mass flow rates, the inlet
cooling water temperature and the number of the ther-
mosyphon tubes on the thermal performance of the collec-
tor was experimentally studied. Mathiouslakis and
Belessiotis (2002) presented an investigation on a new type
of solar heat collector employing a heat-pipe filled with eth-
anol, aimed to transfer heat from the collector to the water
tank directly. A two-phase closed-loop thermosyphon was
utilized with the condensation section placed in the water
tank. The maximum instantaneous efficiency of the system

0038-092X/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2013.07.025
20 L. Wei et al. / Solar Energy 97 (2013) 19–25

Nomenclature

A area, m2 D temperature difference, K

cp specific heat, J/(kg K) a absorptivity of the absorber plate
d distance between the glass cover and the absor- b tilt angle of solar collector, °
ber plate, m e emissivity of the absorber plate
g gravitational acceleration, m/s2 g solar heat collector efficiency
G solar radiation absorbed by the absorber plate, l viscosity, N s/m2
W/m2 q density, kg/m3
h heat transfer coefficient, W/(m2 K) r Stephan Boltzman constant, 5.68  108 W/
hlv latent heat of vaporization, J/kg (m2 K)
k thermal conductivity, W/(m K) s transmissivity
L length of glass cover, m
m mass, kg Subscripts
m_ mass flow rate, kg/s a ambient
n time step c condenser
Nu Nusselt number e evaporator
q heat transfer rate, W g glass
p pressure, Pa i inlet
Ra Rayleigh number l liquid
t time, s o outlet
T temperature, °C p absorber plate
U total heat transfer coefficient, W/(m2 K) r heat pipe
V velocity, m/s sat saturation
W width of glass cover, m v vapor
z number of vertical heat pipe w water

Greek symbols

reached 60%. Based on the similar solar water heater sys- collectors, excluding the oscillating heat pipe. Based on
tem, Esen and Esen (2005) investigated the effect of adopt- this, a new solar heat collector with one large integrated
ing different working fluids on the thermal performance of heat pipe is proposed in this study, experimentally and the-
the system. The experimental results showed that the work- oretically. The main advantages are high stability and leak
ing fluid could influence the performance of heat-pipe type avoidance between the water cooling side and the solar
of solar water heater. R410A worked best compared with heating side. In order to investigate the thermal perfor-
R407C and R-134a. The daily maximum collection effi- mance of new solar heat collector, an experiment was con-
ciency was 58.96% for R410A. In another experiment, ducted on a clear day. Additionally, a transient heat
Esen (2004) found that R-407C was the best choice for a transfer model was built based on the energy balance for
solar cooker integrated vacuum-tube collector compared each component of the collector and calculated in compar-
with R-22 and R-134a. Rittidech and Wannapakne ison with the experimental data.
(2007) and Rittidech et al. (2009) creatively used the oscil-
lating heat pipe as the heat transfer element in the solar
water heater system. The experimental results showed that
the efficiency of the solar heat collector with the closed-end
oscillating heat pipe could reach 62%. Using the oscillating
heat pipe, the main advantage is that the high heat rate can
be transferred through a small cross-section area.
As can be seen from the literature review above, there
are two methods to improve the thermal performance of
solar water heater. One is the optimization design of the
structure of the solar water heater system; the other is the
continuous search for new heat transfer elements. All the
solar water heater systems introduced in the literature
above have a row of separate heat pipes in solar heat Fig. 1. Structure of solar heat collector with integrated heat pipe.
 L. Wei et al. / Solar Energy 97 (2013) 19–25
Fig. 2. Heat transfer inside collector from the absorber plate to the cycling
water.
Fig. 3. Experimental set-up of the flat-plate solar water heater with the
new collector.
2. The structure of solar heat collector
The new solar heat collector has an integrated heat pipe,
the scheme of which is shown in Fig. 1. The collector is
comprised of a glass cover, an integrated heat pipe, an
absorber plate and an insulation layer. The integrated heat
pipe consists of fifteen vertical pipes, two horizontal con-
nected pipes on two ends of the vertical pipes and one
working fluid-returning pipe. Each vertical tube is attached
to the absorber plate with selective surface. Ethanol is used
21
as the working fluid and the filling ratio is 50%. For the
boiling point of ethanol is low, the heat pipe can start up
easily at low temperature. The channel of the flowing cold
water to take away heat is in the center of the upper col-
lected pipe. This type of heat pipe structure with more area
of condenser section would have higher total heat transfer
coefficient from the heat source to the heat sink. The design
of returning pipe which leads the working fluid to flow
back to the evaporator section makes the heat pipe work
more stably.
The heat transfer process inside the collector is shown in
Fig. 2. The solar radiation is firstly captured by the absor-
ber plate with selective surface. Then, the heat is trans-
ferred to the vertical pipe, sustaining the evaporation of
the liquid ethanol. Through the process of continuous
evaporation on the inner surface, vapor flowing in the ver-
tical pipe, condensation in the condenser inside the heat
pipe, the heat is finally transferred to the water pipe,
increasing the water temperature.
3. Experimental set-up
As shown in Fig. 3, the experimental set-up consists of a
solar heat collector, a water storage tank, a water pump, a
valve, and a flow meter. The inclination between the collec-
tor and horizontal level is 60°. The length and the width of
the collector are 2.0 m and 1.0 m, respectively.
The experiment was conducted from 09:00 to 16:00 on
July 9, 2011. The total mass of the water in the storage tank
Fig. 4. Distribution of the solar radiation on the glass cover at times 9:30
(a) and 12:00 (b).
22 L. Wei et al. / Solar Energy 97 (2013) 19–25

was 200.0 kg and the initial water temperature was 25.2 °C.
The mass flow rate of the water through the water flowing
channel was set as 0.2 kg/s. In the test, the solar radiation
(G) was measured every 30 min from 09:00 using the solar
power meter. The measurement points were distributed
uniformly covering the glass area (x = 0.0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5,
2.0 m and y = 0.0, 1/3, 2/3, 1.0 m). Fig. 4 displays the dis-
tribution of the solar radiation on the glass cover at 09:30
and 12:00. The average solar radiation versus time during
the test is shown in Fig. 5. The solar radiation changed
with time and reached the highest value at noon.
The temperatures of the ambient, the absorber plate,
water at the inlet and outlet of the flowing channel were
measured using carefully calibrated K-type thermocouples.
The thermocouples were placed at right locations through- Fig. 6. Daily temperature changes of the water at inlet (Tw,i), the water at
out the system. The data was recorded by Agilent 34970A outlet (Tw,o), the glass cover (Tg), the absorber plate (Tp).
data acquisition system. As seen from Fig. 6, at the begin-
ning, the temperature of absorber plate drops due to the
start-up of the cycling water. Because of the decline of
the solar radiation, the water temperature stops increasing
after16:00. After a day’s work, the temperature of water in
the storage tank increases from 25.2 °C to 50.0 °C. Before
the test, the measure instruments had been carefully cali-
brated. The uncertainty in temperature measurements,
solar radiation measurement, and flow measurement were
0.75%, 5.0%, and 0.5%, respectively.
In the present work, the collection efficiency (g) of the
solar heat collector indicates the ratio of the amount of
the heat transferred to the water to the total amount of
solar radiation received on the collector during the same
period of time.
mw cp;w DT w
g¼ R ð1Þ Fig. 7. Collector efficiency versus (Tp  Ta)/G.
A Dt Gdt

The time step (Dt) was set equal to 30 min. According to
the experimental results, the collector efficiency was calcu-
lated every half an hour during the working time. Based on
Eq. (1), the uncertainty of the collector efficiency is esti-
mated to be 5.1%. The collector efficiency versus (Tp  Ta)/
G is shown in Fig. 7. The collector efficiency reaches 66%
and the slope of linear fitted line in the figure is
9.57 W/(m2K), which indicates serious heat loss from
the collector. In order to improve the collector efficiency,
the heat loss via natural convection between the glass cover
and the absorber plate as well as heat loss via the heat con-
duction in the insulation should be prevented.
4. Theoretical analysis

In this part, a transient heat transfer model of the solar

water heater employing the new collector is proposed. The
analysis is focused on three parts: the glass cover, the heat
pipe and the water. The energy balance for each compo-
nent is illustrated in Fig. 8. To simplify the analysis, five
assumptions are made as follows.

1. Ignoring the heat loss from the insulation.

2. Ignoring the thermal contact resistance in the process
of heat transfer.
3. The temperature of the absorber plate and water in
the tank is uniform.
4. Ignoring the temperature difference along the evapo-
Fig. 5. Daily changes of the average solar radiation on the glass cover. rator and condenser section.
 L. Wei et al. / Solar Energy 97 (2013) 19–25 23

Fig. 8. Heat transfer model of each component of the solar collector.

5. The physical properties used in the calculation are t

T pnþ1 ¼ T np þ ðAg sg ap Gn  Ag hnpg ðT np  T ng Þ
constants. ðmcp Þp
4 4
 ep Ag rðT np  T na Þ  zAr;e U nr;e ðT np  T nw;i ÞÞ ð6Þ
The energy balance equations are described as follows. t
T wnþ1 ¼ T nw þ zAr;e U nr;e ðT np  T nw;i Þ ð7Þ
As shown in Fig. 8(a), the glass cover absorbs heat from ðmcp Þw
the solar radiation and natural convection between the
The heat transfer coefficients (hga and hpg) in the equa-
absorber plate and the glass cover, while it loses heat due
tions were calculated according to the empirical correla-
to the convection of the ambient air. All heat transfer pro-
tions proposed by Watmuff et al. (1977) and Hollands
cesses result in the changing of the temperature of the glass
et al. (1976).
cover.
hga ¼ 2:8 þ 3:0V w ð8Þ
dT g
ðmcp Þg ¼ Ag ag G  Ag hga ðT g  T a Þ hpg d
dt Nu ¼
þ Ag hpg ðT p  T g Þ ð2Þ k air
" # þ
1:6
1708ðsin 1:8bÞ 1708
As shown in Fig. 8(b), the absorber plate gets the solar ¼ 1 þ 1:44 1  1
Ra cos b Ra cos b
radiation heat, while at the same time it transfers heat to
" 1=3 #þ
the glass cover through natural convection, to the sur- Ra cos b
rounding environment through radiation and to the heat þ 1 ð9Þ
5830
pipe through conduction. The conduction heat is equal to
the heat transferred from the plate to the flowing water. Vw is the wind velocity. The notation [ ]+ designates that
dT p the quantity in the square bracket is set equal to zero if
ðmcp Þp ¼ Ag sg ap G  Ag hpg ðT p  T g Þ  ep Ag rðT 4p negative.
dt
The heat transfer coefficient in the evaporator is based
 T 4a Þ  zAr;e U nr;e ðT p  T w;i Þ ð3Þ on the correlation proposed by Imura et al. (1991). It is dif-
ficult to deal with the transfer coefficient at the condenser
The water in the storage tank obtains the latent heat
because of the start-up process and its variation with the
released from the condensation of the vapor in the heat
solar radiation. In this study, hc is calculated reasonably
pipe.
by a linear transformation of he. In the Eq. (11), f is a func-
dT w tion of time.
ðmcp Þw ¼ m_ w cp;w ðT w;o  T w;i Þ ¼ zAr;e U nr;e ðT p  T w;i Þ ð4Þ !
dt 0:3 0:7 0:2 0:4  0:3
q0:65
l k l C p;l g q psat
Applying an explicit method of finite difference scheme, he ¼ 0:32 0:4 0:1
ð10Þ
q0:25
v hlv ll
pa
the Eqs. (2)–(4) were discretized to the form of Eqs. (5)–(7),
respectively. hc ¼ f  he ð11Þ
t Eq. (1) is used to calculate the collector efficiency and the
T nþ1
g ¼ T ng þ ðAg ag Gn  Ag hnga ðT ng  T na Þ time step (Dt) is set equal to 1 s. The experimental condition
ðmcp Þg
is applied in the numerical simulation. The calculation
þ Ag hnpg ðT np  T ng ÞÞ ð5Þ results are shown in Figs. 9–13.
24 L. Wei et al. / Solar Energy 97 (2013) 19–25
Fig. 9. Collector efficiency and solar radiation versus time.
Fig. 10. Numerical collector efficiency versus (TP  Ta)/G compared with
the experimental result.
In Fig. 9, the solar radiation (G) is the experimental
result, while the collector efficiency (g) is the simulation
result. Concluded from the efficiency curve, as a result of
successful start-up of the heat pipe the collector efficiency
increases quickly before 10:00. From 10:00 to 13:00, it
almost maintains a constant because of the sufficient solar
radiation and good thermal performance of the heat pipe.
Fig. 11. Temperatures of the water (Tw) and the absorber plate (TP)
versus time.
Fig. 12. Changes of he and hc versus time.
Then, the efficiency declines slowly due to the reduction
of the solar radiation and the increase of the water temper-
ature. Qualitatively, the collector efficiency shows the same
change tendency with the solar radiation.
The numerical simulation result in Fig. 10 indicates that
the theoretical collector efficiency during a period of 30 min
is much higher than the experimental result. Probably it is
caused by the large heat loss in the experiment and the
overestimated heat transfer coefficients. The slope of the
linear fitted line of the calculated data is 5.38 W/(m2K).
In comparison with the experimental result, the absolute
value of the simulative slope is much lower, which implies
that the heat loss from the experimental device is
underestimated.
The calculated temperatures of the absorber plate and
the water in the tank together with the experimental results
are shown in Fig. 11. From the simulation result, the tem-
perature of the water reaches 52.5 °C at 16:00 and the curve
is in general accordance with the measured data. The
model is thus verified. However, the difference between
the experimental result and the simulation result of the
absorber plate temperature is about 10 °C. The main rea-
son is because the average temperature of the absorber
plate is calculated in the physical model. Actually, the tem-
perature over the plate surface could not be uniformly dis-
tributed. Therefore, there exists large discrepancy between
the numerical and experimental results for the absorber
plate temperature.
Heat transfer coefficients in the evaporator and con-
denser alter with time due to the changes of the tempera-
ture and the solar radiation, as shown in Fig. 12. The
large fluctuation of the value of hc has an obvious effect
on the total heat transfer. Therefore, the thermal perfor-
mance of the heat pipe is essential for the design of solar
heat collectors.
Based on the physical model, the influence of the natural
convection between the absorber plate and the glass cover
on the collector efficiency is discussed and shown in Fig. 13.
The maximum collector efficiency could reach 73% by
keeping the inner space of the solar heat collector in
 L. Wei et al. / Solar Energy 97 (2013) 19–25
Fig. 13. Efficiencies of the vacuum collector and the non-vacuum
collector.
vacuum state. In the experimental set, the space between
the absorber plate and glass cover was full of air, so a little
part of the heat captured by the plate was transmitted to
the glass cover through the natural convection.
5. Conclusion
From the experimental and numerical study of the plat-
plate solar collector with an integrated heat pipe, it can be
concluded that
1. The experimental results showed that the maximum col-
lector efficiency of the solar water heater could reach
66% by employing a new type of solar heat collector,
and the temperature of water of 200 kg in the tank
increased by 25.0 °C after a day’s work. By enhancing
the thermal insulation of the collector, the efficiency will
be higher. In conclusion, this new collector has a desired
thermal performance and it can be well applied in the
solar water heater system.
25
2. The mathematical model of the heat transfer process
inside the new collector is present in this study. Reason-
able empirical correlations of heat transfer coefficients
are adopted to calculate the work efficiency. Concluded
from the simulation results, the temperatures of the
water and the absorber plate increase with time. The col-
lector efficiency shows the same tendency with the solar
radiation. In addition, the collector efficiency could get
further improved by keeping vacuum state inside the
solar heat collector.
Acknowledgment
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial sup-
port by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
under Grant No. 51161140332.
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