Solar Water Heating Collector Parameters

Hi Paul,

My group is working through picking a thermal collector for our system, and we noticed that some of the parameters (collector area, test flow rate) listed in SAM for the collectors do not match their SRCC certification documents. I understand this might be due to the SAM library not being updated. I am hoping to define my own parameters based on the SRCC documents to have them be the correct values, but I am unsure whether the values in SAM listed for FRta, FRUL, and IAM are also incorrect. I am unsure how to calculate these values based on the information in the SRCC collector certification documents, partially due to never having used the Hottel-Whillier-Bliss equation. The only information about the HWB equation in the SAM SWH literature I have found is in the help page for collector parameters. Do you have any information on how to find FRta, FRUL, and IAM used in SAM from a SRCC certification document? The SAM library pulls its values from the SRCC, but I am unsure how it has done so. Here is one such SRCC certification document. 

Thanks, 
Chase P.

Solar water heating systems include storage tanks and solar collectors. There are two types of solar water heating systems: active, which have circulating pumps and controls, and passive, which don't.

Hi Chase,

The collector library for SAM's solar water heating model is from an old list of collectors from the SRCC OG-100 Certification Program. I'm not sure exactly when it was built, but probably around 2011.

Collector test data and parameters are described in Section 6.17 of the fourth edition of John A. Duffie and William A. Beckman's Solar Engineering of Thermal Processes textbook.

Best regards,
Paul.