Numerical investigation of suction and blowing effects on fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics of solar air heater

Abstract

Solar air heater is a cheapest way to extract heat from the nature, the increase of air temperature can be used for various applications like drying, space heating, process heating, etc., Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) plays a prominent role on the design and development of solar air heater. The present investigation deals with the effect suction and blowing on the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics using CFD. A finite volume-based solver Ansys Fluent is used for finding the field variables. The channel length, width, confinement height and transition length are 1000 mm, 500 mm, 25 mm and 1000 mm respectively. Among all cases studied, blowing yields better efficiency than suction with maxima of 42.35% at mass flow rate of 0.05 Kg/s.