Review analysis on performance of ribbed solar air heater by CFD approach

Abstract

Solar air heaters (SAHs) are used in a wide variety of household and industrial applications. Smooth absorber plate in traditional solar duct has a low value of convective heat transfer coefficient. Enhancing the thermal efficiency of SAHs can be achieved by using artificial roughness ribs placed on the absorber plate. However, this use of roughness results in increasing the pressure loss due to the friction between the airflow and roughened plate surface. This paper presents a summarized review of the recent studies that deal with the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to enhance the thermohydraulic performance of SAHs by utilizing different designs of artificial roughness ribs. This includes the selection of a high-performance turbulence model based on Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) approach. The enhancement in the thermal performance parameter of a solar air heater, by utilizing different shaped roughness geometries with different configurations, based on recent studies is presented at a specific value of Reynolds number.