الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
. There is an increasing demand to use solar energy in the industrial sector in Egypt. The new national strategy 2030 in the energy sector recommends using solar energy in industrial applications such as heating processes in factories, heating and cooling applications using sorption technology, and seawater desalination. The aims are to fulfill the growing energy demand and to reduce the gas emissions resulting from fossil fuels. The heating loads in the industrial sector are in the order of hundreds of kWs and in some cases, reach few MWs. Designing and optimizing large-scale solar fields for industrial applications are still insufficient to fulfill the national plans. Therefore, the objective of the present research is to provide a reliable method to design a flat plate solar collectors network that supplies the needed mega-scale hot water duty for industrial processes and commercial applications and to determine the optimum storage tank volume. The present study will also consider higher temperatures than the ambient temperature at the inlet to the solar collectors since most of the heating mediums will return from the heating loads warm. The primary concerns in the design of a flat plate solar collectors network are to determine the minimum number of flat plate solar collectors required and the optimum parallel and series arrangement which is essential to minimize the initial and running costs of the solar system. Therefore, A steady-state mathematical model considering the thermal resistances of all components of a commercial flat plate solar collector module was developed and integrated into all possible arrangements in series and parallel connections. The model was programmed in MATLAB. Various operating parameters affecting the performance of flat plate solar collectors such as fluid inlet temperature, the solar intensity, and the ambient temperature were considered in the optimization process and various charts were produced providing the minimum number of solar collectors for specific heating duty. A dynamic mathematical model was introduced to evaluate the precision of the solar field’s design proposed by the steady-state model and was used to obtain the optimum storage volume to collector area ratio for different sizes of solar water heating systems. The results show that for small-scale solar water heating systems (below 10 kW), the optimum range of the storage tank volume to collector’s area ratio is around 70 lit/m2 . For medium-scale (from 10 kW to 25 kW) and large-scale (higher than 60 kW) solar water heating systems, the optimum storage tank volume to collector’s area ratio is around 40 lit/m2 and 10 lit/m2 , respectively