The Students from "Elena Doamna" High School build a solar colector on their own

          

         We, the students from “Elena Doamna” high school in Galati, working in the “SUN ENERGY” consultancy company, are ready to show the plans for the construction of a solar collector for water heating.

       Few days ago, we went together, all of us, to buy the materials in a shop for this project.

       The school sustains this project by paying the sums for almost all the needed materials.

       Our collector, a flat one, will have an active surface of 1,8 square meters from a total surface of 2 square meters.

        In our area, the collector will capture and transfer into the water heating around 1200 kWh/m2.

How does the solar collector work? The “good” greenhouse effect is in charge with this work. For this reason, the solar collector is made from a rectangular wooden frame of 2000x1000mm, with a height of  80 – 100 mm, a bottom made from a galvanized steel sheet, a 50 mm thick layer of thermal insulation material, an active flat solar collector made from copper pipes connected with “T” and “L” joints, and aluminum clip-fins. The box with all these component parts inside is covered with a 4-6 mm thick plate of transparent cellular polycarbonate.

Two ends of the solar collector pipes are to be connected through a resistance to heat piping with the heat exchanger (the loop) of the hot water tank.

To build the solar collector, we will use few tools that are to be found in the mechanical workshop of the school and they will be used by all our students in order to get the necessary technical abilities for making such equipment themselves.

In the first week of April (2 – 6 April 2012) the group of 15 students involved in the project, from the 9^th and 11^th grade, have met in the workshop and built the solar collector under the supervision of the coordinating teachers.

Both for the teachers and the students involved, it has been an interesting experience, because it was an opportunity for the students to apply their knowledge in Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Technology and the result of their work will have practical applications.

            The advantages are huge for the small cost of the solar collector:

-         it uses efficiently the free and endless solar energy;

-         it has the capacity to capture solar radiation in proportion of 95%;

-         it is completely non-polluting;

-         it has reduced weight;

-         it can be easily installed on roofs with different inclination angles.

It shows the students, parents of the school and the local authorities that by using relatively simple methods, they can build ecologically friendly devices that transform solar energy into heat with minimum costs. It is a way to show people that they can easily build such a cheap device that could be used in every home by everyone, reducing hot water costs.