Performance improvement of a double-pass V-corrugated solar air heater under recycling operation

ABSTRACT

The device performance of double-pass V-corrugated solar air heaters with external recycle was investigated experimentally and theoretically. The comparison between V-corrugated and flat-plate collectors was made to show the thermal efficiency improvement with various operating parameters. The results show that the collector efficiency improvement of the recycling double-pass V-corrugated operation is much higher than those of the other configurations under various recycle ratios and mass flow rates. However, there exists the penalty on the power consumption increment due to implementing V-corrugated channel into the solar air heaters, an economic consideration on both the heat-transfer efficiency enhancement and power consumption increment for the double-pass V-corrugated device was also delineated. The experimental setup was carried out to validate the theoretical predictions, and the fairly good agreement between both results was achieved with the error analysis of 0.48-1.83%.

KEYWORDS:

• Double-pass operation
• heat transfer efficiency
• recycle effect
• solar air heater
• V-corrugated absorber

Acknowledgment

The authors wish to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of China for the financial support.