Approximately 50 % of the production costs of a solar-thermal collector are related to the collector structure (figure 3; structure, glass cover, assembly cost). Furthermore, these components define the collector’s weight and its handling especially on the houses’ roofs. Since the collector manufacturers insist on the use of the expensive solar glass, reengineering activities have to concentrate on the collector structure.

Competitors Analysis / Types of Solar-Thermal Flat-Plate Collectors

Aluminium still is the dominating material of the standard frame structure designs (except for large-scale collectors where wood is still often in use for the collector structure).

Few companies (e. g. GREENoneTEC, St. Veit/A; thermolsolar, Landshut/D) offer collectors with deep-drawn aluminium troughs. The trough design, however, offers a considerable potential for cost reduction due to the minimum number of parts and thereby avoided processes of material handling, logistics and assembly.

Only Buderus, Wetzlar/D, currently uses plastic as structural material in a flat-plate collector (figure 4). The former ALLIGATOR Sunshine Technologies GmbH, Berlin/D, also made use of plastics for the structure of a roof-integrated collector (solar-thermal and photovoltaic) as seen in figure 5.