PERFORMANCE PREDICTION OF A MULTI-TANK DOMESTIC HOT WATER SOLAR PLANT

Poor stratification in Domestic Hot Water (DHW) storage tanks strongly reduces the performance of solar collectors. As stratification disturbances are frequent particularly in medium-large size plants, it is more realistic to consider fully mixed tanks. Multi-tank storage systems can work well even if stratification is not assured, provided that suitable connections in the tanks allow different thermal levels in every tank, forming a kind of forced stratification. Three control strategies of multi-tank systems have been simulated and compared with single-tank