Testing and Analysis of a Heat-Pipe Solar Collector

We developed an integral heat-pipe/evacuated-tube solar collector in which the inner receiver tubes form the evaporator sections of glass heat pipes. This paper describes both theoretical analyses and empirical tests, comparing the performance of the glass heat-pipe solar collector with one of today’s high efficiency evacuated-tube solar collectors. The comparison demonstrates that the performance of the two collectors is effectively identical. The testing and analysis indicate that the glass-wick-type glass heat pipe is an effective heat transfer system for evacuated-tube solar collectors.