In this thesis, performance of a heat pump aided by solar heating system with an evacuated tubular collector has been analyzed theoretically and experimentally. For this purpose, a domestic hot water heating system has been designed, constructed and tested. The evacuated tubular solar collector has been used to achieve higher collector efficiency in winter. The fraction of the solar energy utilized has been measured experimentally and estimated theoretically. Effects of various parameters have been investigated on the performance of the proposed system. A mathematical model was developed to investigate the effects of different environmental, design and operational parameters on the solar heating system. In order to compare the obtained theoretical results with experimental ones, an experimental study has been carried out. For that, a number of experiments have been made at the solar house of the Mechanical Engineering Department of METU. An air-to-air heat pump was integrated with an evacuated tubular solar water heater unit (closed water circulation) and the performance of it has been studied experimentally. As a result of the experimental study, the maximum value of the coefficient of performance of the solar assisted heat pump used in this study was obtained as 4.85. The second law efficiency of the system was between 4.8-27.4 %.

In this thesis, yearly performance of the solar adsorption cooling system which is proposed to be installed to a residential building in Antalya is theoretically investigated in detail. Firstly, thermodynamic designs of the adsorption cooling cycle for three different types of cycles which are intermittent, heat recovery and heat &amp / mass recovery cycles are presented. Secondly, adsorption characteristics of three adsorbent/adsorbate pairs which are zeolite-water, silica gel-water and activated carbon-methanol are given. Following this, load side (i.e., building) of the system is designed and parameters that should be considered in building design are presented. Then, solar-thermal cooling system design methodology with an emphasis on solar fraction is presented. In addition, system parameters effecting the performance of the adsorption cooling system are analyzed and results are presented. Finally, economic analysis is done in order to understand the economic feasibility of the solar-thermal cooling systems compared to conventional cooling systems. TRNSYS is used for the yearly simulations and an integrated model of the overall system is developed in TRNSYS. Since energy consumption and performance investigations of environment-dependent systems such as building HVAC, refrigeration systems and solar collectors usually require weather information, typical meteorological year (TMY) data for Antalya is also generated in order to be used in the analysis of the system parameters.

This thesis introduces a design optimization methodology that is based on minimizing the Cost of Energy (COE) of a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) that is to be operated at a specific wind site. In the design methodology for the calculation of the Cost of Energy, the Annual Energy Production (AEP) model to calculate the total energy generated by a unit wind turbine throughout a year and the total cost of that turbine are used. The AEP is calculated using the Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory for wind turbine power and the Weibull distribution for the wind speed characteristics of selected wind sites. For the blade profile sections, either the S809 airfoil profile for all spanwise locations is used or NREL S-series airfoil families, which have different airfoil profiles for different spanwise sections, are used,. Lift and drag coefficients of these airfoils are obtained by performing computational fluid dynamics analyses. In sample design optimization studies, three different wind sites that have different wind speed characteristics are selected. Three scenarios are generated to present the effect of the airfoil shape as well as the turbine power. For each scenario, design optimizations of the reference wind turbines for the selected wind sites are performed the Cost of Energy and Annual Energy Production values are compared.

This thesis presents an aerodynamic shape optimization methodology for rotor blades of horizontal axis wind turbines. Genetic Algorithm and Blade Element Momentum Theory are implemented in order to find maximum power production at a specific wind speed, rotor speed and rotor diameter. The potential flow solver, XFOIL, provides viscous aerodynamic data of the airfoils. Optimization variables are selected as the sectional chord length, the sectional twist and the blade profiles at root, mid and tip regions of the blade. The blade sections are defined by the NACA four digit airfoil series or arbitrary airfoil profiles defined by a Bezier curve. Firstly, validation studies are performed with the airfoils and the wind turbines having experimental data. Then, optimization studies are performed on the existing wind turbines. Finally, design optimization applications are carried out for a 1 MWwind turbine.