Techno-Economic and Environmental Feasibility Analysis of Solar water Heating System for a Textile Industry In Bangladesh

Abstract

Considering the energy crisis and environmental concerns, green energy technologies are being focused to harness energy from every available source. Extraction of thermal energy using solar collector is one such technology that is very promising to be used in the industrial sector as it is one of the largest energy-consuming sectors which mainly consumes thermal energy. Textile industries are one of the most common industrial sectors in Bangladesh requiring a large amount of hot water in different processes. No existing literature is found exploring the potential of integrating solar thermal collectors in the textile industry of Bangladesh. In this thesis, the feasibility of using solar thermal energy in the textile industries of Bangladesh is studied from thermal, economic and environmental perspectives. For this purpose, a review of solar collectors is carried out to select the appropriate solar collector analyzing different parameters e.g. weather condition, heat demand, and economical aspect. Flat plate solar collector is selected for this work and the modeling of the collector is done extensively explaining the design parameters, assumptions and relevant calculations. MATLAB code is developed and validated with existing literature to analyze the thermal performance of the collector varying different parameters. Economic and environmental analyses are also conducted since the economic anal- 3 4 ysis is one of the most crucial parts of the feasibility study and environmental analysis helps to determine the environmental impact of installing solar thermal collector in the system. From this study, it is found that integration of solar collector can save up to 14.7% energy in the summer and approximately 9% in the winter for the system studied in this work which leads to a payback period of 13.58 years. From the environmental analysis, it is found that the amount of CO2 emission that can be reduced is around 2.8 tons per day in summer and 1.65 tons per day in winter indicating this to be environment-friendly solution from Bangladeshi context.