Solar collectors with colored absorbers

The integration of solar collectors in buildings should be compatible with the architectural design, and solar collectors with colored absorbers would be aesthetically preferable. In our laboratory we constructed and tested flat plate solar collectors with colored absorbers for water heating applications. The study includes collectors in their typical form with the protective glazing, and also collectors without glazing. Unglazed solar collectors are not widely used, although they are cost effective solar devices, suitable for low temperature thermal applications. We tested outdoors the constructed models, glazed and unglazed, with black, blue and red brown absorbers. In order to overcome the high thermal losses of the unglazed collectors and the low optical efficiency of the colored absorbers, we used flat booster reflectors. The additional solar radiation input from the reflectors increases the thermal energy output of the collectors, improving their performance. Theoretical steady state efficiency curves are also given for collectors with or without glazing. The presented experimental and theoretical results determine the range of the effective operation of the proposed solar collector types, which can be used in a variety of applications, instead of glazed or unglazed solar collectors with a black absorber. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.