A new perspective to the conventional solar pond technology to increase the thermal efficiency

Abstract

In this study, a new perspective was introduced to conventional solar pond technology to spread its commercial application. In order to make it more useful with preserving energy efficiency, the brine layers were replaced with the normal freshwater by using a separated transparent partition. Structurally modified three different solar ponds were proposed and numerical investigations were conducted by using discrete ordinate method (DOM). For this, four types of solar ponds were modeled, the first one is the conventional salt-gradient solar pond and three others are modified versions which are named as "Pure Water Solar Pond." For all models, a comprehensive finite element method was developed to investigate the daily performance of solar ponds by using commercial software COMSOL. Salt-gradient solar pond consists of seven layers where one layer is the heat storage zone, five layers are nonconvective zone, and one is the upper convective zone. However, in the modified models, solar ponds consist of two glass layers and one to three pure water zones depending on the model types. The numerical method includes a novel approach to calculate all the zone where absorption, emission, scattering, transmission, convection, and radiation are taken into account. Numerical results for all models were compared with an experiment to correlate the numerical accuracy of the DOM with anisotropic scattering phase function. Results indicate there is a good correlation between these four model approach and the experiment.