Active solar system, which utilize water for energy storage, are common. The over-all performance of such systems is influenced significantly by the temperature distribution in the water energy storage unit.
In this study, two dimensional model is formulated to study the temperature distribution in storage tank, and an experimental study is carried out.
The effect of the Q(flow rate), ΔT(difference between hot and cold water temperature), and ASP (aspect ratio Ro/L) have been examined and a comparison has also been made with a simple one-dimensional approximation.
In two-dimensional analysis, buoyancy effects were neglected to prevent the instability of results and it causes the relatively large discrepancy between the theoretical and experimental results near the wall. But in center region a fairly good agreement with experiments is obtained.
For small Q, ΔT, and ASP, the results of experiment coincided with the theoretical results and well designed distributor is necessary to obtain relatively small differences between them.
There should be further study on the two-dimensional analysis with buoyancy effects to acquire the results that agree better with experiment.
