Solar air heating collectors that use columns of aluminum soda pop cans or that use metal gutter downspouts as the absorber are quite popular.
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| Greg's pop can collector in work |
In this design, the supply air flows into a plenum at one end and is distributed to the pop can columns or downspouts, the air then flows up the pop cans. The sun striking the outside of the black painted cans heats them up, and this heat is transferred to the air flowing up through the cans.
One of the challenges for an efficient design is to get the same flow in each of the pop can columns. Having unequal flows in the columns makes for a less efficient collector with some parts of the collector running hotter than they need to and losing heat out the collector glazing.
When I built a downspout collector for testing against other collector types, I was unable to come up with a plenum design that gave an even flow in the downspouts... I think that this may have been a significant part of why the collector did not do so well in the testing compared to the screen absorber.
Sooooo, if you are building or have a pop can or downspout collector, how about testing the flow in each column, and see how the flow comes out on yours. If its not close to the same in each column, maybe you can experiment around with changes to the collector to get the flow to even out?
Testing for even flow is easy to do, and coming up with a collector/plenum design that provides even flow to all the can columns would be a real benefit to a lot of collector builders.
On my prototype, I measured the flow by making a small hole in each column, and then read the column air velocity by inserting a wind meter in the hole.
The results looked like this...
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| Flow in each of the 13 columns. |
Gary
January 4, 2013
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