The influence of climatic conditions on the efficiency of the solar system

Abstract

The simulation analysis of the solar hot water preparation system for an apartment building is presented. The analyses investigated the effect of climatic conditions on the efficiency of the solar system. To demonstrate the influence of climatic conditions, four building locations (Stockholm, Prague, Milan, and Barcelona), six different solar collectors, and six different design areas of solar collector field were used. The aim was to verify how the efficiency of the solar system varies depending on the climatic and design conditions. Moreover, the influence of year-to-year fluctuations of climatic conditions was also explored. The analysis has been provided by using TRNSYS simulation software over the period of one year using the time step of 2 minutes. The simulation results clearly showed that the efficiency of the SDHW system is dependent on the climatic conditions, especially on the air temperature. On the other hand, year-to-year weather fluctuations do not strongly affect the efficiency of the SDHW system.