Alaska has higher energy prices and the second highest per capita energy use in the nation. When heating systems fail in cold climates, it often leads to bursting pipes and other significant infrastructure damage, thus compounding the costs associated with repairs. The problems of high utility bills and heating system failures are exacerbated in remote areas of Alaska, where natural gas is largely unavailable and expensive alternatives like oil are used instead. An area of growing interest that could address these problems is the storage of solar energy for use when the sun goes down. While most research has focused on the commercial aspect of solar thermal storage for space heating, there is a clear need to conduct more research into the residential possibilities, as new technologies could greatly reduce utility bills and add to the reliability of heating systems. The primary difficulty is how to economically store thermal energy for use on a seasonal basis in regions with considerably darker winter months. The project attempts to address this gap, by building an experimental setup for investigating and optimizing solar thermal storage systems using locally available and inexpensive materials for residential applications in Alaska. The experimental setup enables study of thermal storage by changing: storage material type; heat transfer rate, flow rate and velocity; the number of heat transfer tubes; the geometry and size of heat transfer tubes. This would allow for determining thermal storage systems that are applicable to climatic conditions in Alaska and other cold regions. Furthermore, the experimental setup can be used for demonstrating the technology in undergraduate courses such as Heat and Mass Transfer; and Thermal Systems Design.
| File Size : | 1
file
, 4 MB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 7 |
| Product Code(s) : | D-CCC23-43 |
| Published : | 2023 |
| Units of Measure : | Dual |
