Methods for reducing heat losses from flat plate solar collectors: Phase II. Final report, February 1, 1976--August 31, 1977

Improvements to flat plate solar collectors for heating and cooling of buildings were investigated through two parallel studies. The first study, which deals with the free convective heat loss from V-corrugated absorber plate to a plane glass cover, has shown that, for the same average spacing, the free convective heat loss is greater for a V-corrugated absorber plate than for a plane absorber plate. However, provided the average spacing is large enough, the amount of increase is slight. The second study, which deals with the free convective heat loss in a honeycomb solar collector in which the honeycomb consists of a set of horizontal partitions, or slits, has shown that provided the solar collector is tilted to near vertical, such a honeycomb gives equivalent or superior free convective loss suppression than does a square-celled honeycomb having the same amount of material. Correlation equations for the free convective heat loss are given for both studies

A time series model for Kt with application to global synthetic weather generation

This article describes a general mathematical procedure for generating synthetic daily solar irradiation values. The procedure should be useful for simulating solar energy systems, requiring only the 12 monthly means ( K t ), as input. The procedure is based on a time series analysis of the daily K t values, described in the article. It incorporates the well-known probability distribution function for K t , by using a transformed variable, rather than K t , as the fundamental random quantity