Thermal Performance Optimization of Flat Plate Solar Collector using MATLAB

Solar flat plate collectors are one of the very important solar system components as they serve the purpose of heating up the ambient air/water for domestic and industrial uses like drying, cooking, thermal power generation, etc. It is therefore of significance that such flat plate collectors be appropriately designed for optimum performance and reliability at the point of usage. A solar flat plate collector needs to maximize its solar energy collection ability and have a good heat removal factor ability; which are achievable by properly configuring and sizing of its components. This research work presents the coding system for the parametric optimization study to determine the absorber plate thickness, back insulation thickness and tilt angle of a flat plate collector by using a written computer program in MATLAB R2013b base on appropriate equations and computed system parameters used for the research. From the study carried out, it was found that the heat removal factor does not respond significantly to changes in the absorber plate thickness. In order to maximize the heat removal factor, the absorber plate thickness of 1.5×10 -5 m with a heat removal factor of 0.7454 was determined. The back-insulation thickness for the solar flat plate collector was found to be 0.0235 m using sawdust with thermal conductivity of 0.06 W/mK as the insulating material. The study also revealed that the amount of solar energy collected on a flat plate collector surface can be affected by the choice of the orientation of the flat plate collector. For maximum solar collection in the considered geographical location of Zaria, the tilt angle for the solar flat plate collector was found to be 20 0 , tilted from the horizontal facing the south with 2.22×10 7 J/m 2 day -1 solar insolation collected on the flat plate collector.