Solar Heat Exchanger

This demo shows a Coroplast heat exchanger project intended to extend/maximise your solar air heater usage to these periods sun is shining but fan is not turning . Why not grabbing this spoiled heat and use it later when sun is gone ? This strictly fictive design is my answer to this simple question.

Keeping some of the heat produced during the day is a real challenge with a solar air heating panel: Usually one would need a cumbersome heavy rock storage to store a significant fraction of that heat . A water tank would theorically be better since water permits to store more BTUs per volume than rocks. But as far as I know, there is no available domestic heat exchanger system that can transfer heat from heated air to a water tank.

The idea shown here is to turn a Coroplast stack into a heat exchanger. Water or a glycol tank can be used. The air circulates through the Coroplast corrugations from one side to the other transmitting the heat to the surface of the Coroplast sheets. Making this HE watertight is quite a problem but I hope this problem could be solved with a lot of silicone caulk and "rubber boots". :-)

Yet another problem to solve is the maximum heat Coroplast can endure before melting. Coroplast is supposed to perform nicely under 140F which is about the temperture one can achieve whith a Cansolair type collector. Lowering the temperature would also be possible with a variable CFM fan: The higher the CFM the lower the temperture.

2000 hits on February 3 then 2500 hits on March 26, 3000 on May 25 : That's a lot of hits for that little idea I had last year. I'd like to thank all those interested in my solar design ideas. I already got a stack of 20 Coroplast plates cut to fit into a 4''X4'' duct header but I'm not quite happy with this minimal configuration:This system could be more efficient if I had something close to a 40 plates stack put into a 4''x10" header. The air flow would be less restricted this way, though fluid constriction and laminar friction could become helping hands through the heat extaction process. The first prototype will be "U-Shaped" since U-shaped heat exchanger will not need any kind of complicated airtight seal to work properly.

Comments are welcome.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• solar
• heat
• exchanger
• manifold
• Cansolair
• Coroplast
• storage
• air
• water
• furnace
• pop
• cans
• popcans
• Hőcserélővel

[Heliopolite]

Transfering heat between two different fluids: Air to liquid in this case.

[oppy1984]

I have no idea what the point of this was...