A comparative performance analysis of solar heat exchangers for solar hot water application under controlled laboratory conditions

The paper presents the experimental performance evaluation of a novel retrofit heat exchanger (‘SolaPlug’) developed for solar hot water storage applications. The performance of this system was compared with a traditional dual-coil (‘Coil’) solar cylinder under controlled operating conditions. The tests were conducted under different solar-simulated conditions with a 30 and 20 evacuated tube collector. The results showed that after a 6-h test period, the average water temperatures within the store for the ‘SolaPlug’ system were 58.8°C and 40.5°C at 860 and 459 W m−2, respectively, and for the ‘Coil’ system were 60.5°C and 40.6°C when a 30 tube collector was used. The performance of the ‘SolaPlug’ system was marginally better than the ‘Coil’ system under the low solar input condition. Under high insolation condition, the overall ‘SolaPlug’ system efficiency was found to be 4.3% lower than that of the ‘Coil’ system. The ‘SolaPlug’ heat exchanger rating was 222 W K−1.