Monitoring of a flat plate solar thermal field supplying process heat

The article reports the performance data of a flat plate collector field installed in Austria and supplying process heat to a meat factory, up to a temperature of about 95 °C. The presented data span an entire year, thereby including seasonal effects and allowing for a full characterization of the system performances. Sensor uncertainty is also discussed in detail. Finally, a bin method analysis of the field efficiency is provided. To this purpose, different operating conditions are concisely represented by the so-called reduced temperature, typically used in solar collector applications.