Enhancement of heat transfer in solar collectors by vortex generation

Rahmani, Ebrahim, Fattahi, Abolfazl, Moradi, Tofigh, Hajialigol, Najmeh, Karimi, Nader and Doranehgard, Mohammad Hossein (2022) Enhancement of heat transfer in solar collectors by vortex generation. Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 44 (1), 1731-1750. (doi:10.1080/15567036.2022.2056666).

Abstract

The importance of solar energy is evident by considering running out of fossil fuel resources and the growing energy demand. The clean and worldwide source of the sun can be a crucial remedy for the energy crisis throughout the world by extracting renewable and CO2-free solar energy. Solar air heaters are the most common type of heat exchanger for various aspects of solar energy. The conventional type of solar air heaters suffers from low thermal performance. In the current numerical study, some novel geometries are introduced for improving the thermal performance of the air heaters with a highly turbulent flow by borrowing the vortex cooling concept in gas turbine blades. The parameters of Nusselt number, friction factor, and effective efficiency are investigated. The results show a higher heat transfer for the current configurations in comparison to those examined and simulated in the literature. It is such that a minimum 400% increment in the Nusselt number can be obtained compared to that of the simple channel of absorber plate. The efficiency values reveal that the proposed configurations are more economically efficient compared to traditional solar air heaters, especially in the lower Reynolds number, by an increment of about 25%.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Nader Karimi

Download statistics