Design Guidelines - Solar Space Heating of Factory Buildings

The method uses nomograms that were expanded upon using simulations of typical system configurations. There are nomograms for two different system configurations that can be used to determine reasonable values for the collector and storage tank size for a factory building with a known heat demand.

Nomograms are useful because they help to decide whether it is necessary to use a water filled storage tank or if it makes sense to use the thermal mass of the concrete floor slab as heat storage. The advantage of using the concrete floor slab is that the costs for a (often times large) storage tank can be saved.

Further aspects covered in this report are the necessity of an insulation layer underneath the floor slab, reasonable orientation of the collectors and specific collector yields that can be achieved with the different system configurations.