Salinity-gradient solar ponds are of interest as a means for collecting solar energy and storing it as heat for such low-temperature applications as space heating, industrial water heating, and crop drying Used in such applications, solar ponds may be significantly lower in cost than other solar collectors; and they combine at the same time the capability of long term storage In favorable sites where conventional fuel costs are unusually high, it is possible to use solar ponds for solar thermal power generation By far the largest solar ponds operated to date are those at the 5MW peaking power station at the north end of the Dead Sea in Israel Their intrinsic storage capability distinguishes solar pond power stations from other solar-electric systems

Salinity Gradient Solar Ponds

Modelling temperature variation and thermal stratification in shallow aquaculture ponds

Aquaculture pond ecosystem model: temperature and dissolved oxygen prediction — mechanism and application

New theoretical modelling of heat transfer in solar ponds

Commercial buildings and institutions are generally cooling-dominated and therefore reject more heat to a groundloop heat exchanger than they extract over the annual cycle. This paper describes the development, validation, and use of a design and simulation tool for modeling the performance of a shallow pond as a supplemental heat rejecter in groundsource heat pump systems. The model has been developed in the TRNSYS modeling environment and can therefore be coupled to other GSHP system component models for short time step (hourly or less) system analyses. The model has been validated by comparing simulation results to experimental data collected from two test ponds. The solution scheme involves a lumped-capacitance approach, and the resulting first-order differential equation describing the overall energy balance on the pond is solved numerically. An example application is presented to demonstrate the use of the model as well as the viability of the use of shallow ponds as supplemental heat rejecters in GSHP systems. Through this example, it is shown that ground-loop heat exchanger size can be significantly decreased by incorporating a shallow pond into a GSHP system.

http://www.hvac.okstate.edu/sites/default/files/pubs/papers/2000/04-Chiasson_Spitler_Rees_Smith_00.pdf

W.T. Sha

Papers

Dependence of ground heat loss upon solar pond size and perimeter insulation: calculated and experimental results