Numerical Simulation of Flow over a Flat Unglazed Transpired Solar Collector (UTC) and it’s Performance Prediction

Abstract

An unglazed transpired solar collector is a system that can leverage the abundant solar energy for various purposes. The solar collector is available in flat or corrugated form and is seen to be installed as an exterior layer of building facades. The cladding thus made absorbs radiation from the sun and heats up air being sucked by fan and flowing through perforations. In this research the focus has been to understand the correlation of plate temperature, exit temperature, the velocity distribution in the chamber and perforation location when air flows past an unglazed transpired solar collector (UTC). The establishment of correlations was carried out in the dataset of flow variables obtained after solving the problem using Navier-Stokes (NS) equations along with standard two-equation (k-ε) turbulence models and Shear Stress Transport (SST ) k-ω models for turbulent flow. The same problem was also solved using NS equation using laminar model. An attempt has also been made to compute Pearson’s correlation coefficient of any two variables to understand their strong and weak correlations. A linear regression analysis was done through an open source software Rstudio for a dataset produced during the computational modeling using a commercial CFD solver, Ansys® Fluent. At the end a Monte Carlo simulation has been done to predict the likelihood of using the flat UTC for drying as well as to understand the dependency of system efficiency on plate exit temperature, suction velocity and freestream temperature.