Title: Modelling and simulation of portable solar Scheffler reflector water heater using soft computing techniques

Authors: Mangesh Phate; Shraddha Toney; Vikas Phate

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, AISSMS College of Engineering, Shivajinagar, Pune, Maharashtra, India ' Department of Computer Engineering, AISSMS, Institute of Information and Technology, Pune, Maharashtra, India ' Department of Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering, Government Polytechnic Amravati, Maharashtra, India

Abstract: Solar Scheffler reflector is a parabolic reflecting dish that concentrates sunlight for various solar based applications. The major disadvantages of the traditional flat plate collector are lower temperature in the concentrator system as compared to the parabolic concentrator. Experimental analysis of solar Scheffler reflector has been carried out for the performance improvement in Indian climate. A dish of 27 m² size has been designed for the study. The maximum capacity of 15 lit received was used for the analysis, which serves as a hot water storage system. The thermal efficiency was estimated based on the reflector's incident radiation shape, operation time, dish area, altitude angle, the initial temperature of the water, and tilt angle of the reflector. Response surface method and artificial neural network were employed to analyse the Scheffler reflector's performance. A good agreement was observed between the model predicted and the measured efficiencies. This work made an effort to predict the Scheffler reflector's thermal efficiency for water heating. The statistical parameters were calculated between actual or experimental efficiency with the model predicted efficiency. It found that the model predicted response of both RSM and ANN shows a good agreement.

Keywords: artificial neural network; solar Scheffler reflector; response surface method; solar energy; efficiency; hot water system.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2023.134773

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2023 Vol.73 No.2, pp.91 - 103

Received: 19 Oct 2022
Accepted: 21 Feb 2023
Published online: 09 Nov 2023 *

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