Solar Energy Vol. 72, No. 4, pp.

299–305, 2002
 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd
Pergamon PII: S 0 0 3 8 – 0 9 2 X ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 7 9 – 2 All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain
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THERMAL PERFORMANCE OF COMBINED SOLAR SYSTEMS WITH

DIFFERENT COLLECTOR EFFICIENCIES
L. HENDEN, J. REKSTAD † and M. MEIR
Department of Physics, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1048 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway

Received 10 August 2000; revised version accepted 27 June 2001

Communicated by ERICH HAHNE

Abstract—The performance of two kinds of solar systems for space- and domestic hot water heating has been
compared by computer simulations. One system is a conventional radiator-based heating system with collectors
of ‘ideal’ collector coefficients. The second system is a low temperature heating system with solar collectors of
moderate efficiency. The investigation shows that the difference in performance of the two systems is in the
order of 1–6%.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. INTRODUCTION transfer the necessary power. In low temperature

heating systems, e.g. floor heating systems with
The main barrier for a large-scale introduction
large heating surfaces, the temperature in the heat
of thermal solar systems is the high costs com-
distribution system can be reduced to approxi-
pared to conventional heating systems. Solar
mately 5–78C above the room temperature. A low
systems for domestic hot water (DHW) prepara-
system temperature will generally increase the
tion require collector areas in the range of 3–5 m 2
solar gain of the collectors and extend the buffer
for a typical single family household. The collec-
store’s thermal range of utilization (Rekstad et al.,
tor area for combined systems for DHW prepara-
1998).
tion and space heating (solar combisystems) is
The aim of the present paper is to compare the
considerably larger. Hence the costs of the collec-
performance of two kinds of solar systems. The
tors gain more importance, and the need of less
solar gain will give a basis for evaluating the
expensive collectors that are adjusted to this field
payback of the ‘investment in the collector ef-
of application becomes evident.
ficiency’ and in the complete heating system.
Normally the collector costs are related to the
Few investigations of this kind have been
efficiency at high operating temperatures. Con-
carried out. The effect of collector efficiency on
ventional solar systems operate at a temperature
solar gain in small and medium-sized DHW
which is significantly higher than the temperature
systems has been investigated by Furbo and Shah
in demand from the user’s side. The latter tem-
(1997). The study concludes that the system
perature is in the range of 20–238C for space
performance is only weakly linked to the collector
heating and approximately 508C for DHW prepa-
efficiency. The question whether larger collector
ration.
area or higher collector efficiency meet the heat
The line of development shows that solar
demand of a solar combisystem is studied by
collectors have been introduced as an additional
Fischer (1999), while the performance of solar
component to standard radiator-based heating
combisystems in the German market has been
systems with oil, gas, biomass or electricity as
tested, and their theoretical potential of perform-
auxiliary heating source. Radiator systems require
ance has been studied by Pauschinger et al.
a temperature that is approximately 30–508C
(1998). These investigations referred, however, to
above the desired room temperature in order to
heat distribution systems with high forward tem-
peratures only. The influence of the heat dis-
tribution temperature in small solar combisystems
†
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. has further been investigated by measurements
Tel.: 147-22-856-475; fax: 147-22-856-422; and computer simulations (Neumann et al., 1996;
e-mail: john.rekstad@fys.uio.no Dahm, 1998).

299
300 L. Henden et al.
2. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
We study the total thermal performance of two
solar system designs, shown in Fig. 1. System (A)
is a radiator-based heating system with a highly
efficient collector specified by almost ‘ideal’
collector coefficients (collector (a)). System (B) is
a low temperature heating system with a non-
selective collector of moderate efficiency (collec-
tor (b)). In order to carry out a fair comparison,
the systems are made as similar as possible. In the
design of the buffer store we allow free transport
of the heat carrier between store volume and solar
circuit, and between store volume and heat dis-
tribution system, both for system (A) and (B). The
elimination of heat exchangers enables the utiliza-
tion of solar heat at temperatures as close as
possible to the required forward temperature in
the radiator system (A) and the low temperature
heating system (B). The buffer store includes an
immersed tank for DHW pre-heating of 200 l
volume.
As shown in Fig. 1, the auxiliary heat for DHW
preparation Q AUX( 1) and for space heating
Q AUX( 2) is provided by an external heating source.
The total auxiliary heat is the sum of these
contributions, and presents the total power re-
quired in order to obtain the desired temperatures
for space heating and DHW preparation. We
assume that the systems (A) and (B) have the
Fig. 1. The two different solar combisystems that we com-
pare: Radiator based heating system (A) with a collector of
‘ideal’ collector coefficients (a), and a low temperature heating
system (B) with a collector of moderate efficiency (b).
remaining system parameters in common: the
annual demand of space and DHW heating, the
collector area, the tilt angle, the DHW pre-heater
store volume and the heat buffer store volume.
One basic difference between the two system
designs is the lower threshold temperature for the
supply of auxiliary heat to space heating. This
threshold temperature, in the following named
‘characteristic’ temperature, is for the radiator
system (A) 608C and for the floor heating system
(B) 258C. The second difference lays in the
collectors’ efficiency. The collector efficiency
may in the first order be approximated by a linear
function in DT /I,
DT
h 5 h0 2 k ? ]
I
where DT 5 (T collector 2 T ambient ) and I is the
intensity of incident solar radiation. The coeffi-
cients characterising the two collectors are:
Collector (a): h0 5 0.81, k 5 3.0 Wm 22 K 21
Collector (b): h0 5 0.81, k 5 5.8 Wm 22 K 21 .
The efficiency curves of (a) and (b) are shown in
Fig. 2. The difference in the system performances
will give a basis for evaluating the payback of
investment in ‘the collector efficiency’ and in the
complete system. The collector with moderate
efficiency has similar characteristics as the poly-
mer-based collector described in (Henden, 2000;
Norwegian Patent, 1994; Meir et al., 1997; Rek-
stad et al., 1999).
3. THE SIMULATION PROGRAM
The performance of the systems was modelled
by a simulation program developed at the Uni-
versity of Oslo (Ingebretsen, 1992). The program
calculates the solar gain for the specified system,
based on the insolation, the ambient temperature,
the latitude, the parameters specifying the solar
collector system, the total energy demand for
DHW preparation and space heating and their
daily and annual load profiles. The time step for
the calculation is set to 1 h, the results are given
with monthly resolution. Instead of using standard
Test Reference Years, the weather data are gener-
ated by a Monte Carlo-type simulation. Few
parameters need to be adjusted in order to obtain
representative data for the local climate to the
extent necessary for modelling the performance of
solar systems. The relations used for modelling
the solar irradiation and the ambient temperature
are presented in Sections (3.1) and (3.2). The
 Thermal performance of combined solar systems with different collector efficiencies
Fig. 2. Efficiency of the ‘ideal’ collector (a) and the moderately efficient collector (b).
typical CPU consumption of a 1-year calculation
with 1-h time steps is about 1.5 s using a single
node 300 MHz PC. The simulation program is
thus an efficient tool to study the effects of
various design and weather parameters.
3.1. The insolation model
The simulation program uses a semi-empirical
relation in order to generate the ‘weather’ and
herewith the solar irradiation during a year. The
weather is characterised as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’,
defined by the clearness index K (Duffie and
Beckman, 1991):
K 5 H /Ho . 0.5 for ‘good weather’, and
K 5 H /Ho , 0.55 for ‘bad weather’.
From this the number of succeeding days with
good or bad weather can be determined, as well as
their frequency distribution. The present model
was developed on the basis of weather statistics
from the southern part of Norway. For these data
the frequency of observed period lengths can be
described by an exponential function (Ingebret-
sen, 1992):
P(n d ) 5 1 2 exp(2n d / kn d l),
where P(n d ) is the probability that the number of
succeeding days with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ weather is
n d days or less, and kn d l is the mean period
length. The simulation program selects the actual
period length from this distribution. For other
301
locations this distribution is assumed to have a
similar functional form. The solar irradiation I on
a horizontal plane can be described by the follow-
ing empirical formula (Meinel and Meinel, 1977;
Sørensen, 1979):
I 5 S ? exp[2[a ? (c´ 1 c 1 1 c 2 cos( r ))] c 3 ] (2)
S is the Solar constant, a the atmospheric thick-
ness, c 1 , c 2 , c 3 , are empirical parameters depen-
dent on the declination, time-angle and latitude.
The term cos( r ) 5 cos(2p ? (d / 181) / 365) com-
pensates for the mean seasonal variation and the
parameter ce describes the absorption in the
atmosphere. Typical simulation input values for ce
are 0.4 for climates with mainly clear sky and 0.9
for mainly overcast sky. The diffuse component
of the solar radiation is not calculated explicitly,
but absorbed in the normalisation of the radiation
flux.
In order to verify the weather data generated by
the program, simulated and measured period
length distributions have been compared for vari-
ous insolation intensities, and are illustrated in
Fig. 3. The frequency distribution shows a satis-
factory agreement between simulated and mea-
(1) sured data for high insolation intensities. The
frequency of the lowest intensities is underesti-
mated by the model. This effect is, however, of
minor importance when the thermal performance
of solar systems is calculated, because such low
solar intensities are below the threshold insolation
for the solar system operation.
302 L. Henden et al.

Fig. 3. Simulated and measured period length distribution for different solar irradiation intensities for the location Oslo.

3.2. Ambient temperature in-situ measurements (Rekstad et al., 1981). The

The model generates the ambient temperature
in terms of daily mean values which are modified
such that it represents the ambient temperature
during sunshine hours, T a . This temperature is
representative for the periods in which the solar
system is active. It has the following seasonal
variation:
S d 2 d w 1 91
T a (d) 5 T¯ a 2 DT¯ a ? sin 2p ? ]]]]
365
D (3)
where T¯ a is the annual mean value, DT¯ a the
amplitude of annual variation of T a , and d w is the
day number of the warmest day of the year. A
relation similar to Eq. (3) determines the variation
of the cold tap water temperature T c during the
year.
3.3. Program validation
Simulations with the present program have
been compared with TRNSYS simulations
(Rømen, 1992) and with results obtained from
comparison is shown in Table 1. The present
simulation gave about 8% lower performance than
the corresponding TRNSYS simulation, case 4.
This deviation is in the same order as the differ-
ence between measured and simulated solar gain
for case 3. For cases 1 and 2 the monitoring
periods were short, so that the uncertainty of the
results are larger. We conclude that the present
simulation program gives satisfactory results, both
compared to the in-situ measurements and to the
results of the TRNSYS simulations.
4. SYSTEM PERFORMANCE STUDIES
The thermal performance was determined for
the system configurations (A,a), (A,b), (B,a),
(B,b). The influence of collector area (10 m 2 ,
20 m 2 , 30 m 2 ) and buffer store volume (1 m 3 ,
2 m 3 , 3 m 3 ) were studied. Each configuration was
analysed for northern European climate (Oslo,
Norway, 59.98 N) and middle European climate
(Stuttgart, Germany, 48.88 N). The mean annual

Table 1. Simulated solar gain compared to results from in-situ measurements

Case Measuring / Collector Heat store Measured Simulated TRNSYS
simulation area volume solar gain solar gain simulation
period [m 2 ] [m 3 ] [kWh] [kWh] [kWh]
1 Feb.–May 98 31.7 3.0 3040 3070 –
2 May–Aug. 98 21.1 2.0 2590 3930 –
3 1 year 28.0 3.0 6550 6150 –
4 1 year 100.0 6.0 – 19 720 21 460
 Thermal performance of combined solar systems with different collector efficiencies 303

Fig. 4. Influence of collector area and heat store volume on the annual solar gain for different kind of solar systems: The
performance of ‘ideal’ flat plate collectors (a) and collectors of moderate efficiency (b) are studied in combination with
radiator-based heating (A) and with a system with low temperature heating (B). The performance was calculated for Oslo. The
uncertainty of 690 kWh / a is due to the Monte Carlo weather generator for a 10 years period.

insolation on a horizontal surface is 1139 kWh / m 2
for Stuttgart and 985 kWh / m 2 for Oslo
(Meteonorm, 1997). The collector tilt angle is 458
and the orientation of the collector field is direct
south. For each configuration the mean value of a
ten-years simulation was calculated. The reference
case is an average single-family household in
Europe with a daily hot water consumption of 250
litres at a temperature of 528C. The annual heat
demand for space heating is 12 000 kWh and for
DHW preparation 4600 kWh.
Fig. 4 illustrates the dependency of solar gain
on collector area and buffer store volume for
location Oslo. The left part of the figure shows the
performance of the ‘ideal’ collector in different
system configurations, the right part that of the
collector with moderate efficiency. The uncertain-
ty of 690 kWh / a is related to the fact that the
weather in the simulation program is generated by
a Monte Carlo-type simulation and refers to a 10
years simulation.
The delivered energy increases with increasing
collector area. The dependency of the heat store
volume is small, particularly for the smallest
collector area. For the 10 m 2 collector, the differ-
ence in delivered energy between the three buffer
store volumes is less than 7%. However, the
collector of moderate efficiency is less dependent
on the buffer store volume than the ‘ideal’
collector. For a given collector area, buffer store
volume and system type the solar gain of the
‘ideal’ collector is always larger. For system (A)
the difference is 2563%, for system (B) 1462%.
The performance of the collectors in a low
temperature heating system (B) exceeds in all
cases the performance in a radiator-based heating
system (A). Table 2 compares the annual solar
gain of the system configuration (A,a) and (B,b)
for the location Oslo and Stuttgart based on the
same reference case. The presented results are
again annual mean values over a 10 years simula-
tion period with an uncertainty of 690 kWh / a.
The solar gain does not differ more than 6%
between configuration (A,a) and (B,b) (Oslo:
1–5%, Stuttgart: 1–6%). Hence the solar gain of
a combisystem with collectors of moderate ef-
ficiency in a system with a low temperature
heating is almost the same as with the gain
obtained from high efficient collectors with a
radiator based heating system.
Fig. 5 shows the results of Table 2 in terms of
Fig. 5. The influence of the collector area on the annual solar
fraction for system (A,a) and (B,b) for the locations Oslo and
Stuttgart. The buffer store volume is 1 m 3 per 10 m 2 collector
area.
304 L. Henden et al.

Table 2. Influence of collector area and heat store volume on the annual solar gain of combined solar systems in northern
European climate (Oslo) and middle European climate (Stuttgart). The annual solar gain in kWh, obtained in a system with an
‘ideal’ collector and a radiator-based heating system (config. (A,a)), and in a system with a collector of moderate efficiency and
low temperature heat distribution system (config. (B,b)). The uncertainty is 690 kWh / a for all values
Collector Store Annual solar gain, Annual solar gain
aperture area volume OSLO STUTTGART
[m 2 ] [litres] [kWh a 21 ] [kWh a 21 ]
(A,a) (B,b) (A,a) (B,b)
10 1000 3780 3610 4450 4410
2000 3870 3800 4710 4420
3000 3910 3860 4760 4600

20 1000 4980 4850 6170 6140

2000 5200 5140 6430 6350
3000 5300 5220 6480 6530

30 1000 5420 5390 6980 6880

2000 6020 6020 7440 7790
3000 6210 5910 7630 7880

solar fraction as a function of the collector area NOMENCLATURE

for a buffer store volume of 1 m 3 per 10 m 2
collector area. The uncertainty of the calculated a atmospheric thickness dependent on solar position,
5unity at zenith
values due to the weather simulation is shown.
ci empirical parameters dependent on declination,
For the configuration (A,a) the solar fraction time-angle, latitude; i51, 2, 3
ranges from 23 to 37% in Oslo and from 27 to ce empirical parameter, describing the atmospheric
46% in Stuttgart. For the configuration (B,b) the absorption
solar fraction lays between 22 and 36% for Oslo d day number (1, 356)
dw day number of the warmest day of the year
and between 27 and 48% for Stuttgart.
H daily mean solar irradiation at ground level
(Wm 22 )
H0 maximum solar radiation at ground level on a clear
day (Wm 22 )
5. CONCLUSION I intensity of incident solar radiation (Wm 22 )
K clearness index
The thermal performance of different solar k overall heat loss coefficient (Wm 22 K 21 )
combisystem designs have been investigated: The nd period length5number of succeeding days of same
collector was either almost ideal or with moderate clearness index K
efficiency, while the heat distribution system was kn d l mean period length
either based on high or low temperature dis- P(n d ) probability for a period of succeeding days n d of
same clearness index K
tribution. When we compared the combination Q AUX(i ) auxiliary heat; i51: space heating; i52: DHW
‘ideal’ collector efficiency and radiator-based preparation
heating (A,a) to the combination moderate collec- S Solar constant (Wm 22 )
tor efficiency and low temperature distribution T a (d) ambient temperature during sunshine hours of day
system (B,b), the following conclusions were d (8C) amplitude of annual variation of T a (K)
mean annual ambient temperature during sunshine
drawn: hours (8C)
• The solar fractions of the systems (A,a) and Tc cold tap water temperature (8C)
(B,b) did not reveal significant differences in T SYS system temperature (8C) cos( r )factor compensating
the various cases investigated. for seasonal variation of I
• The heat distribution temperature is crucial to h solar collector efficiency
h0 solar collector efficiency at DT 5 (T collector
the total performance of the solar system. 2 T ambient ) 5 0
• The collector efficiency is less important when
the temperature in the heat distribution system
is low.
• The results could motivate a reconsideration of Acknowledgements—Financial support from the Norwegian
the strong focus on collector efficiency, which Research Council under the R&D frame program NYTEK —
Efficient, Renewable Energy Technologies is acknowledged.
has been ruling for test institutions and gov- The authors wish to thank Dr. Ole Martin Løvvik for proof-
ernmental subsidy programs until today. reading this manuscript.
 Thermal performance of combined solar systems with different collector efficiencies
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