Abstract

DIAMANTINO, Teresa C.; CARVALHO, Maria João; NUNES, Ana  and  FERREIRA, Cristina. Durability of solar thermal collectors in environments with different corrosivity: inspection and fault analysis. Corros. Prot. Mater. [online]. 2016, vol.35, n.1, pp.15-20. ISSN 0870-1164.  https://doi.org/10.19228/j.cpm.2016.35.02.

Portugal is a country with great potential for the use of solar thermal energy due to the high solar resource. However, this fact, combined with an extensive coastline, has a strong impact on the durability of the materials used in the collectors, whether metallic or polymeric, resulting in the reduction of their lifetime. Based on a survey and on inspection visits made to nine medium and large dimension installations existing in Portugal it was intended to identify the damages in the solar thermal collectors and the components with greater damages and also to verify if a correlation exists between the degradation level observed in the metallic materials, the proximity to the coast and the environmental corrosivity. Many of the problems found were due not only to inappropriate specification of the materials but also to deficient design and/or manufacture of the collectors as well as assembly of the installations. However, the results obtained point to the existence of a correlation between the proximity of the sea/corrosivity category and the level of degradation observed in the different metallic components. This work allowed also to conclude that is fundamental to integrate adequate qualification tests of the materials in collectors certification schemes particularly regarding the absorber and elastomeric materials, as well as a procedure to evaluate collector ventilation.

Keywords : Solar Thermal Collector; Performance; Components; Durability; Atmospheric Corrosion.

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