I am looking to find an approximate for temperatures you can acheive using solar flat plate or evacuated tube collectors for space heating? What temperature can water or air (an answer for both would be great!) reach in the system so that it could be put through a heat exchanger for space heating? Its for biomass drying therefore the higher the better. Thanks!
Thermal performance of solar air heater is low and different techniques are adopted to increase the performance of solar air heaters, such as: fins, artificial roughness etc. In this paper an attempt has been done to optimize the thermal performance of flat plate solar air heater by considering the different system and operating parameters to obtain maximum thermal performance. Thermal performance is obtained for different Reynolds number, emissivity of the plate, tilt angle and number of glass plates by using genetic algorithm.
There is almost no limit. Using mirrors to simply focus sunlight yields temperature high enough to vaporize any material. A piece of flat iron (or a concrete driveway) left out in the sun will reach a temperature of 80 Celsius. You'll literally burn your feet walking on it.
