TY - JOUR
T1 - Thermo-hydraulic and exergetic performance of a cost-effective solar air heater
T2 - CFD and experimental study
AU - Nidhul, Kottayat
AU - Yadav, Ajay Kumar
AU - Anish, S.
AU - Arunachala, U. C.
N1 - Funding Information:
The study has been carried out under the project (File no. TMD/CERI/BEE/2016/048(G)) sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology , New Delhi, Govt. of India. The financial support provided by DST is gratefully acknowledged.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2022/1
Y1 - 2022/1
N2 - An experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study is carried out to investigate the impact of secondary flow strengthening the thermo-hydraulic performance of discrete multiple inclined baffles in a flat plate solar air heater (SAH) with semi-cylindrical sidewalls. Initially, for a fixed relative baffle height (Rh = 0.1), the relative baffle pitch (Rp) for continuous baffles is varied in the range of 0.6–1 to obtain the optimum baffle pitch for 6000 <Re < 14000. The impact of gaps at leading, trailing, and both leading and trailing apices are studied as three different configurations with the optimum Rp. A maximum thermo-hydraulic performance of 2.69 is obtained for the gap at the trailing apex. The proposed design has a higher collector efficiency, 55–70%, compared to the ribbed rectangular SAH design exhibiting 30–55%. With lower exergy losses, the present SAH design has higher exergetic efficiency (1.5%–2.2%)than ribbed rectangular SAH (0.9%–1.7%) for the range of Re studied. Further, at low Re, the present SAH design has a higher coefficient of performance, indicating that it is cost-effective than ribbed rectangular SAH designs.
AB - An experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study is carried out to investigate the impact of secondary flow strengthening the thermo-hydraulic performance of discrete multiple inclined baffles in a flat plate solar air heater (SAH) with semi-cylindrical sidewalls. Initially, for a fixed relative baffle height (Rh = 0.1), the relative baffle pitch (Rp) for continuous baffles is varied in the range of 0.6–1 to obtain the optimum baffle pitch for 6000 <Re < 14000. The impact of gaps at leading, trailing, and both leading and trailing apices are studied as three different configurations with the optimum Rp. A maximum thermo-hydraulic performance of 2.69 is obtained for the gap at the trailing apex. The proposed design has a higher collector efficiency, 55–70%, compared to the ribbed rectangular SAH design exhibiting 30–55%. With lower exergy losses, the present SAH design has higher exergetic efficiency (1.5%–2.2%)than ribbed rectangular SAH (0.9%–1.7%) for the range of Re studied. Further, at low Re, the present SAH design has a higher coefficient of performance, indicating that it is cost-effective than ribbed rectangular SAH designs.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85120691910&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85120691910&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.renene.2021.11.111
DO - 10.1016/j.renene.2021.11.111
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85120691910
SN - 0960-1481
VL - 184
SP - 627
EP - 641
JO - Renewable Energy
JF - Renewable Energy
ER -
