Analytical investigation on thermo hydraulic performance augmentation of triangular duct solar air heater integrated with wavy fins

ABSTRACT

Present work deals with performance improvement of triangular duct solar air heater by integration of wavy fin on absorber plate. An analytical model has been developed for the investigation of design parameters such as fin pitch ratio with ranges 0.05–0.2 and fin amplitude ratio with ranges 0.025–0.125. MATLAB code is generated to solve the energy balance equations by iterative procedure. The influence of design parameters on effective thermal and thermal efficiency is presented and its influences are discussed. Increasing the fin pitch ratio decreases the thermal and thermo hydraulic efficiency drastically. The positive effect of fin amplitude ratio is observed; increasing of fin amplitude ratio improves the thermal efficiency and effective efficiency up to the critical Reynolds number. The peak thermal efficiency of 85% is observed and thermo hydraulic efficiency of 80.16% is found at fin pitch ratio of 0.05 and fin amplitude ratio of 0.125. The maximum thermo hydraulic performance enhancement is 15.7% as it compared simple conventional solar triangular duct air extractors. The design plots are developed to select the performance parameters to attain required temperature rise values.

KEYWORDS:

• Triangular duct
• solar air heater
• wavy fins
• thermal efficiency
• effective thermal efficiency

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.