Optimisation of solar water heating system design using production functions

Forced flow solar water heating systems are designed by obtaining the system configuration which gives the minimum total annualized cost, i.e. solar + auxiliary energy cost for a given load. The annual performance of different solar system sizes therefore needs to be known. In this work, production functions giving useful annual solar water heating system output for various combinations of collector area, tank volume and daily load were first developed using TRNSYS17 simulation generated data, following which techno-economic optimisation was done using marginal cost analysis for a system based in Mumbai. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated