Abstract
This study examined the energy performance according to the main design parameters of a solar water heating system for an office building using the life cycle cost (LCC) optimization simulations. The LCC optimization simulations of the system were conducted with TRNSYS and GenOpt employing the Hooke-Jeeves algorithm for cases where water temperature was $60^{\circ}C$ and $50^{\circ}C$. The results showed that for water temperature at $60^{\circ}C$ and $50^{\circ}C$ the global radiation incident on the collector could be decreased by 16.98% and 28.52%, collector useful energy gain could be decreased by 15.04% and 22.59%, energy to load from storage tank could be decreased by 10.86% and 18.06% and AH energy to load could be increased by 16.86% and 38.50% respectively compared to a non-optimized system. The annual average collection efficiency of the collector was increased by 0.88% for $60^{\circ}C$ and 2.78% for $50^{\circ}C$ because of increase of collector slope and decrease of the mass flow rate per collector area. The annual average efficiency of the system was increased by 1.74% and 3.47% compared to the basis system. However, the annual solar fraction of the system was decreased by 6.68% for $60^{\circ}C$ and 11.26% for $50^{\circ}C$ due to decrease of collector area and storage tank volume.
