Designing and Fabrication of Double Pass Solar Air Heater Integrated with Thermal Storage

This research work is to create a working model of the active type, solar air heater with the capacity of thermal storage. Paraffin wax is used as the thermal storage material. Blower is used for forcing air into the air heater. The ideal material for better conductivity is analyzed for its properties and used. Aluminium was used for collector plate due to its high thermal conductivity. This work enhances the efficiency of solar air heater as it was designed for heating the atmospheric air twice and also the environmental changes like disturbance in the continuous expose of Sun rays to the collector plate by clouds has not affect the heating temperature as the thermal storage kit was implemented. The readings were taken by using thermocouples. Thus a model solar air heater was developed and tested to have an efficiency of 70 %.