Performance Investigation of Sinusoidal Corrugated Absorber Plate Solar Air Heater

Abstract

This paper presents the CFD analysis of performance investigation of sinusoidal corrugated absorber plate solar air heater (SAH). The thermal performance is investigated with various inlet mass flow rates and solar heat flux. Simulation process of this model is carried out using CFD base analysis using Ansys (fluent) software. Air heater involving sinusoidal absorber plate, baffles and fin are modelled by ANSYS Workbench. Base model CFD results are validated against published ones and found to have a good agreement. In this paper we compare thermal efficiency and temperature at the exit of sinusoidal absorber plate solar air heater with fin, baffles and without fin and baffles. Baffles help in creating recirculation, separation and turbulence zones in the flow passage and fin helps in increasing the net heat transferring area between sinusoidal plate and flowing air. Thus, for the same size as the air heater, thermal efficiency increases. Thermal efficiency increases with rise in mass flow rate and outlet temperature decrease with the increase in mass flow rate. Computations are based on FVM, shear stress transport (SST) k-ω turbulence model, and SIMPLE algorithm has been implemented. CFD tool is used to find out the temperature distribution inside the solar air heater.