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.
                                                   

Photos of all steps of the project

     Choosing everybody`s atributions, the agency name and the project we want to make.

                                    Buying the materials that are required to build our solar pannel.

   
 
 Now we should start building our solar panel.

First we set up the team in the school workshop and get dressed properly for work.

First step: we need to build the wooden box to house the whole assembly.
The housing is made of wood because it is durable and has less weight.

We must fix an aluminium plate on the back of the box.
It covers the back of the box and keeps the assembly together.

After that the box is almost ready.
All that is left to do is to varnish the box with a special solution to protect the  wood.

Then we must process the copper pipes that we need to put in the whole assembly.

First we must cut the pipes.

After that we need to weld the pieces of copper pipes together in the needed shape.

We place the mineral wool over the copper pipe assembly and fix it.

The mineral wool  helps the pipes heat up.

Then we must cut  some aluminum fins to put under the pipes.

This will also make the pipes heat up because aluminum heats up faster than cooper.

Then we must paint the fins in black paint.

This will also help because black color atracts more heat.

After that we must seal the whole assembly with polycarbonate.

Polycarbonate is specially made to use all the light avaible to heat up the pipes.

We must seal the whole assembly with aluminum angle brackets.