C9 - System Integration of solar thermal plants and Computational Thermal Engineering

9th  SolNet PhD Course on
System Integration of solar thermal plants and Computational Thermal Engineering

July 16th – July 20th 2012

This course gave 5 ECTS credit points and was offered within the official PhD courses of Innsbruck University.

The course was attended by 29 PhD students.

The course consisted of two main elements:

• System integration of solar thermal plants
• Computational thermal engineering

The aim of the course on system integration was to show the interaction of different elements in a solar thermal system. The topics included components, guidelines, characterization, analysis of applications, hydraulics, control systems, dimensioning and optimization, design exercise and an excursion to built examples. The different elements were solar collector, solar loop and its components, storage, auxiliary heater, building and space heating system, domestic hot water demand, the climate and the control system. The course gave insight in how to optimize these elements with respect to their function in the system. “Very good components can be put together to a very bad system”.

In the computational thermal engineering lecture the following items were addressed:

• Overview on the finite difference method and the stability of different procedures
• Simulation approaches to transient heat conduction and heat transport including boundary conditions
• Simulation of tubes, heat stores (Water and PCM materials)
• General description of modules for a simulation
• Preprocessing, processing, postprocessing, how to detect errors

Exercise (simulation of the same plant with different simulation tools)