| With the need to address the world's growing energy demand, many new alternative and renewable energy sources are being researched and developed. Many of these technologies are in their infancy, still being too inefficient or too costly to implement on a large scale. This list of alternative energies include biofuels, geothermal power, solar energy, wind energy and hydroelectric power. This thesis focuses on developing a concentrating solar thermal energy unit for the application of an on-demand hot water system with phase change material. This system already has a prototype constructed and needs refinement in several areas in order to increase its efficiency to determine if the system could ever reach a point of feasibility in a residential application. Having put additional control refining systems on the solar water heat collector, it can be deduced that the efficiency has increased. However, due to limited testing and analysis it is undetermined just how much the efficiency of the system has increased. At minimum, the capabilities of the research platform have dramatically increased, allowing future research to more accurately study the dynamics of the system as well as conduct studies in more targeted areas of engineering. In this aspect, the thesis was successful. |
