Experimental and CFD investigation on heat transfer enhancement in evacuated tube solar collector with coiled wire inserts

Abstract

This article presents a novel design of a modified evacuated tube collector fabricated for air heating applications by fixing helical coiled inserts in the vacuum tube. The investigations on modified evacuated tube collector (ETSC-HI) were conducted experimentally and using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and assessed with the unmodified ETC solar air heater under analogous conditions. The working of the modified evacuated tube collector (ETSC-HI) has been scrutinized under different modes, geometrical parameters, flow parameters and different operating conditions. Experimentally, the influence of these variables on outlet air and thermal efficiency of the modified collector have been studied in detail. The CFD findings have been visualized by plotting graphical contours, vectors and streamlines for various cases. Optimal geometrical parameters for maximum heat transfer coefficient were calculated from the CFD investigations and were considered for further experimental analysis by fixing the coiled wire on the vacuum pipe. It was seen that ETSC-HIperforms better contrasted to the unmodified ETC, registering Nusselt number enhancement of 3.23 times corresponding to P/Dh = 1.5 e/Dh = 0.074 at m = 0.015 kg/s. The highest thermal efficiency for ETSC-HI and unmodified collector are obtained as 70.99% and 64.86% respectively showing significant improvement in the performance. On average, the enhancement of 5.85% in daily average efficiency was seen for the modified ETSC-HI.