On the Determination of the Average Temperature in a Horizontal Storage Tank and Its Use in Monitoring the Performance of a Solar Thermosyphon System

The mass weighted average storage temperature is a useful parameter for evaluating the performance of thermal storage systems. It is commonly used in system simulations since detailed temperature data in the storage medium are not known (or even considered). However, it is rarely used in the evaluat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of solar energy engineering 1992-08, Vol.114 (3), p.182-187
Main Author: Bannerot, Richard B
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
142000 - Solar Energy- Heat Storage- (1980-)
250600 - Energy Storage- Thermal
420400 - Engineering- Heat Transfer & Fluid Flow
Applied sciences
CONTAINERS
CONVECTION
CONVERSION
Energy
ENERGY CONVERSION
ENERGY STORAGE
ENERGY TRANSFER
ENGINEERING
Exact sciences and technology
FLOW RATE
HEAT STORAGE
HEAT TRANSFER
MASS TRANSFER
Natural energy
PERFORMANCE TESTING
SEASONAL THERMAL ENERGY STORAGE
SOLAR ENERGY
SOLAR ENERGY CONVERSION
Solar energy storage
SOLAR THERMAL CONVERSION
STORAGE
TANKS
TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENT
TESTING
THERMAL ENERGY STORAGE EQUIPMENT
THERMOSYPHON EFFECT
THERMOSYPHONS
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Description
Summary:The mass weighted average storage temperature is a useful parameter for evaluating the performance of thermal storage systems. It is commonly used in system simulations since detailed temperature data in the storage medium are not known (or even considered). However, it is rarely used in the evaluation of operating systems because of the difficulty in determining it, especially in potentially multidimensional storage configurations, like a horizontal tank. This paper examines the issue of the evaluation of the average storage temperature, specifically from the point of view of reproducibility and how much data is required for a confident calculation. Unfortunately, this issue was not completely resolved and was shown to be strongly dependent on the locations of the measurements. Two examples are presented that demonstrate the usefulness of knowing the average storage temperature. The examples also give a quantitative demonstration of the effect of withdrawal flow rate on the amount of thermal energy that can be withdrawn from a given system. A reduction in flow rate by a factor of four increased the delivered energy by 70 percent.
ISSN:0199-6231
1528-8986
DOI:10.1115/1.2930003