Massive Solar-Thermal Collectors: A Critical Literature Review

The present work reviews the literature produced so far on high-capacitance solar thermal collectors, with the aim of highlighting the wide range of possible variants and applications and sharing the information here gathered for future developments. These solar systems are here denoted with the term of Massive Solar-Thermal Collector (MSTC). The review is focused on liquid rather air technologies, because of their direct applicability to systems that supply only domestic hot water (DHW) as well as combined DHW and space heating (SH) systems. The attention on this topic is justified by the rising number of publications and energy concepts that deal with the utilization of opaque structures as low cost solar absorbers and by the similar MSTC’s efficiency in low temperature range to conventional solar systems.