Investigations at smaller scales have proven to be useful when trying to improve the understanding of how different factors, such as ground heat losses, solar radiation, algae growth, heat extraction method, and salt type, affect solar pond efficiency [5,11–19,30], but these investigations do not necessarily enable prediction of largescale solar pond performance. For example, heat losses through the sidewalls of large-scale solar ponds typically are negligible because the area of the sidewalls is small compared to the area of the bottom of the pond.
In small-scale solar ponds, the area of the sidewalls and the bottom are often on the same order of magnitude, and consequently, the heat losses through the sidewalls could become important. Sidewall shading could also become important in small-scale solar ponds, where the effective sunshine hours are reduced
Therefore, it is important to investigate how the results of small-scale solar pond experiments can be used to understand the expected performance of these solar energy systems at larger scales.