Transient Heat Transfer to Produce Acrylic Solar Panels in Libya

Solar energy is a powerful sustainable energy that has a potential to meet world’s energy needs with decreasing both the reliance on the fossil fuels and carbon dioxide footprint. Acrylic which is a thermoplastic material is used as raw materials to produce soler panels to generate electricity for housing, offices, road lighting and bigger scale plants. Experimental creep curve is used to correlate stress- strain- time behavior. Design stress of acrylic is simulated using Maxwell- Kelvin – Voigt model to calculate the four constants of the model needed in the calculation of the fluid and melt flow of Acrylic in the extruder. Transient melt flow in the extruder and die have been modeled using partial differential equation. Mathematical solution of the partial differential equation leads to evaluation of the thickness of acrylic solar panel. Different sizes are made in with different thickness is ranging from 1.65 meter in length and one meter wide. The design stress is calculated as 28 MN/m2. It is possible to produce larger solar panels using larger sizes of extruders and dies. Biot numbers and Fourier numbers are calculated to recognize the effect of conduction and convection heat transfer to calculate the eject time needed in the die. Seven seconds to thirty-nine seconds are the ejection time obtained from solution of the partial differential equation; Biot number are evaluated to account for the convection to calculate time of 45 seconds to 245 seconds accounting for time needed for the acrylic solar panel to be cooled.