Thermal performance investigation of a solar ...

Thermal performance investigation of a solar air heater with rectangular staggered discrete rib roughened absorber plate using CFD approach

Author Name : Sachin Ahlawat, Aditya Kaushik

ABSTRACT Solar air heater is one of the basic types of solar collectors which absorbs the incoming solar radiations and converted it into thermal energy for various thermal applications. It has been found that the conversion of solar radiation to thermal energy is poor in the conventional solar air heater due to the low heat transfer coefficient between the absorber plate and working fluid of the solar air heater. The use of artificial roughness on the absorber plate is one of the effective techniques to enhance the rate of heat transfer to flowing fluid in a solar air heater. Here thermal performance of a solar air heater consists of rectangular staggered discrete rib roughened absorber plate is investigated theoretically. Computational fluid dynamics solution is carried out using Ansys-Fluent software to analyze the performance characteristics of solar air heater for the range of input parameters such as rib pitch, height of the rib, gap position from the leading edge of the rib, staggered rib position from the gap in the rib and width of the staggered rib. Results show that rib pitch and height of the rib have significant effect on the heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics of the solar air heater. solar air heater with rectangular staggered discrete rib roughened absorber plate has been analyzed for the analysis of heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics.