Life Cycle Assessment and Economic Energy Efficiency of a Solar Thermal Installation in a Family House

Abstract

Designing solar strategies is a powerful step forward to set up an adequate residential house in terms of energy. Many types of research have simulated the energy needs for residential buildings. Designing an improper installation can contribute to a growth in the overall energy expenditure in ensuring thermal comfort. The use of solar thermal processes in Slovakia is on a rise as compared to recent years. This study models twelve solar water heating systems created on the roof of the household. Solar energy techniques are carried out to comply with the demands of heating and domestic hot water. The analysis deals with the most efficient alternative for the arranged solar systems of the building. Considering these installations and the corresponding overall prices of machinery, the best workable alternative is selected. The potential energy performance of auxiliary heating and the energy output of the solar thermal installation are examined. The required amounts of the different energy contributions are modelled and simulated in specific software for a family house in Kosice, Slovakia. We determine the limits of the design for an apartment and analyse which procedure is used to provide the typical average water expenditure and heating need, covering a multi-criteria analysis considering costs, energy, and life cycle analysis of every installation. This approach can support professionals to decide the best scheme considering these criteria, and this method can be satisfactorily applied. In these conditions, converting a conventional gas boiler into a solar thermal system involves monthly economic savings of around EUR 140–250, with payback periods of 2.5–7 years. The energy requirements are fully covered by the solar thermal schemes and the life cycle assessment resulted in reasonable impacts on the environment.

Efficiency of Semi-Automatic Control Ethanol Distillation Using a Vacuum-Tube Parabolic Solar Collector

“…At present, the total solar energy power generation capacity around the world is 2828.8 MW, of which about 2463.9 MW is under construction. In addition, it is also Energies 2022, 15, 4688 2 of 18 commonly used in industries such as the automotive, dairy, food, textile, paper, chemical, meat, and plastic industries [7,8]. Generally, solar thermal energy is used in systems that are heated to less than 260 • C [9].…”

State-of-the-Art Technologies for Building-Integrated Photovoltaic Systems

“…Increasing consumption of electrical energy from primary energy resources increases CO 2 emissions, which has a great impact on the environment [3][4][5]. Intuitively, mitigating energy demands in buildings will substantially curtail the required supply of energy and, hence, minimize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [6][7][8]. Therefore, there is a genuine interest in net-zero energy buildings (NZEBs) from engineers and scientists, focusing on the tangible measure of energy conservation and enhanced performance efficiencies [9,10].…”

Life Cycle Assessment of the Use of Phase Change Material in an Evacuated Solar Tube Collector

“…However, there is much less information about optimization of the environmental use of solar installations, including solar tube collectors. Previous studies on solar tube collectors focused primarily on flat collectors [1][2][3]5,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63]. In addition to determining the environmental impact of flat collectors, there are also indications regarding their optimization at the production stage [1][2][3].…”

“…Whereas, there are few studies that examine the ecological aspect of solar systems based on the vacuum tube technology. There are studies that investigate the life cycle of solar collectors; however, the majority of them are based on Embodied Energy (EE) and Embodied Carbon (EC) along with USEtox and Ecological Footprint (EF), or life cycle cost analysis [16,18,20,27,28,54,63,65,68,73,[75][76][77]. Few studies consider the LCA methodology for a perspective based on actual pollutant for impact assessment individually with a single score [59,78,79].…”

“…From the environmental protection point of view, tubular-vacuum collectors turn out to be a better option considering the least impact generated during their manufacturing phase, compared to flat collector production. Moreover, the majority of studies propose tubular-vacuum collectors for applications for integrated systems with domestic hot water preparation [27,28,63,76,80,81]. Based on the above review it can be stated that solar technologies have many areas for the implementation of innovative solutions.…”