Development of Labyrinth Type Solar Thermal Energy Storage System

This book covers the overall review on solar air heaters, solar dryers and latent heat thermal energy storage devices. It also discusses about the proposed novel design of Labyrinth Solar Air Heater with detailed construction. When compared to old flat plate collectors the new labyrinth pipe structured heat exchanger has some ground breaking advantage. The same starting inlet air will flow through the enter pipe in a single pass, and the gathered heat exponentially by the time the air comes out of the outlet. The structure utilises a small space better than the multiplies solar heat collector. The system can be adopted by medium and low income farmers and the present set up will reduce the use of conventional energy sources up to a very large extent. The study conducted in the open sun drying revealed that the drying time was much larger than that of solar drying. Hence the arrangement would help to reduce the usage of other conventional energy sources/back up used to meet energy requirement during non-sunshine hours to some extent.