Employing a fan to improve the wintery heating performance of solar air collectors with phase-change material: An experimental comparison

Solar Air Collectors integrated with Phase-Change Material (SAC-PCM) were widely used for wintery heating with the superiority of overcoming the mismatch shortcoming between supply and demand time from solar heating. However, the traditional SAC-PCM had the low-efficiency heat output due to the low air flow of natural convection. Based on this, a fan was proposed to enhance air flow and thereby, increase the heat output from SAC, so an experiment was built to compare the thermal performance between SAC-PCM and SAC-PCM with a fan (SAC-PCM-F). The experimental result showed that the fan enhanced the outlet wind speed from 0.8 m/s-1.55 m/s to 2.15 m/s-2.3 m/s and by employing the fan, the heat output was easier from SAC-PCM and the average temperatures of outlet air were increased 4.18 °C in all day with the average temperature difference of outlet and inlet air increased by 1.17 °C. Employing the fan could improve indoor average temperature by 1.17 °C, while the daily heat output was increased by 146.02% by employing the fan and the heat collecting efficiency was increased from 24.92% to 61.32%