Integrated development and modeling of heat pipe solar collectors

Heat pipe solar collectors have a high potential regarding both state-of-the-art collector development and new collector concepts and applications. However, they still suffer from several drawbacks. To overcome those drawbacks and exploit the potential an integrated, holistic development approach is proposed. The integrated approach takes three aspects of integration - system, disciplines and life cycle - into account resulting in a high complexity. To handle complexity strong development methods are required. Promising techniques are given by the methods of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO). Two concepts of integrated collector designs are already presented, further to be optimized by MDO.