Investigation of saturation temperature in solar pond for different sizes

Abstract

This paper deals with the modelling of solar ponds for different sizes to calculate saturation time and temperature by using discrete ordinates method. The modeled solar pond is a subsoil type and aimed to minimize the heat losses by isolating side wall and ground with foam with the thickness of 10 cm in all cases. In the model, upper convective zone is 10 cm deep and non-convective zone consists of five layer and each layer is 10 cm deep and storage zone depth ranges from 40-400 cm. Therefore, the solar pond totally consists of seven layers. The saturation temperature was found to be about 322 K for 12 different solar pond. For a depth of 40 cm, the equilibrium temperature was reached in 1000 hours, 1300 hours for 60 cm, 1400 hours for 80 cm, 1500 hours for 100 cm, 1600 hours for 120 cm, 1750 hours for 1140 cm, 1800 hours for 180 cm, 2700 hours for 200 cm, 1800 hours for 250 cm, 3400 hours for 300 cm, and 6000 hours have passed for 400 cm. As the depth increases, time to reach to the equilibrium temperature increases but increment amount of water and time to reach equilibrium temperature shows a proportional increase. At the same time we calculated that, when we increase the width of the pond by keeping the depth constant, the saturation temperature and the time did not changed for the seven different cases.