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Thermomax Solar Hot Water
How does an Evacuated Heat Pipe Solar Collector Work?
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Thermomax Solar Collector
Thermomax Evacuated Heat Pipe Solar Collectors (tubes) operate differently than the other
collectors available on the market. These solar collectors consist of a heat pipe inside a
vacuum-sealed tube, as shown.
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Thermomax Solar Collector features:
- Each tube contains a sealed copper pipe (heat pipe)
- The pipe is then attached to a black copper fin that fills the tube (absorber plate)
- Protruding from the top of each tube is a metal tip attached to the sealed pipe (condenser)
- These tubes are mounted, the metal tips up, into a heat exchanger (manifold)
- As the sun shines on the black surface of the fin, the liquid inside the heat pipe is heated
- Hot vapor rises to the top of the pipe
- Water, or glycol, flows through the manifold and picks up the heat from the tubes
- The heated liquid circulates through another heat exchanger and gives off its heat to water
that is stored in a solar storage tank
- A Thermomax system is simple to install and easy to expand
A heat pipe acts like a high conductance thermal conductor. Due to its thermal-physical properties,
its heat transfer rate is thousand's times greater than that of the best solid heat conductor of
the same dimensions. The basic heat pipe is a closed container consisting of a capillary wick
structure and a small amount of vaporizable fluid.
A heat pipe employs an evaporating-condensing cycle, which accepts heat from an external source,
uses this heat to evaporate the liquid (latent heat) and then releases latent heat by reverse
transformation (condensation) at a heat sink region. This process is repeated continuously by a
return feed mechanism of the condensed fluid back to the heat zone.
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