Abstract
Solar energy constitutes one of the main alternatives for facing the energy problems of the future. Solar air heaters are used for applications at low and moderate temperatures. Such as crop drying, timber seasoning, space heating, and drying agriculture products. Artificial geometry applied on the absorber plate is the very efficient method to improve thermal performance of solar air heaters. The thermal efficiency of solar air heaters is generally poor due to low heat transfer coefficient between the absorber plate and air flowing in the collector. Thermal performance of the conventional solar air heater was studied under varying solar and ambient conditions in different months. At day time the solar heating system stored the thermal solar energy as sensible and latent heat. A parametric study was done for 10 months for the climatic conditions of Visakhapatnam. The effect of change in the tilt angle, length and breadth of a collector and mass flow rate on the temperature of collector has been studied. The length of the collector is 2.1m and width of the collector is 1.1 m. the performance analysis of system shows potential of improving the thermal efficiency range is 31% to 47% .From the obtained results, graphs are drawn to assess the performance analysis of a conventional air heater.
Highlights
Solar air heaters are devices that utilize solar radiation for a variety of purposes
A conventional solar air heater was analyzed for Visakhapatnam location and graphs are plotted different results are plotted based on different parameters such as solar flux, efficiency, heat transfer coefficient, useful heat gain rate, pressure drop and heat removal factor
From the performance evaluation done on the conventional solar air heater it can be concluded that the analyzed conventional solar air heater worked reasonably well for buildings and agriculture purpose at atmospheric pressure
Summary
Solar air heaters are devices that utilize solar radiation for a variety of purposes. The efficiency of solar air heaters can be affected by various parameters such as collector length, number of channels, depth of channels, type of absorber plate, number and material of glass covers, air inlet temperature and air velocity. All of these parameters and their effects on the efficiency of solar air heaters will be discussed below. Kurtbas and Durmus [4] in their paper have designed a new solar air heater .In their study they used five solar collectors with dimensions of 0.9x0.4 m and the flow line increased where it had narrowed and expanded geometrically in shape These collectors were set to four different cases with dimensions of 1x2 m. The energy used in drying of agricultural and industrial produce is significant and, represents an often reducible element of process cost
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