Thermal performance of a V-Corrugated serpentine solar air heater with integrated PCM: A comparative experimental study

Abstract

The present study conducts a comparative experimental study on the dynamic thermal response and performance of a conventional SAH and SAH equipped with PCM using paraffin packs. Various scenarios were investigated to assess the impacts of PCM usage, PCM melting point, and arrangements of PCM slabs with different melting points on the dynamic thermal response of SAHs. To this aim, two V-type corrugated serpentine SAH prototypes, including conventional and PCM-integrated ones, were simultaneously constructed and tested under field conditions. Two types of paraffin wax with different melting temperatures, 40 °C and 50 °C, with four PCMs arrangements, were installed on a SAH. The experimental runs were carried out in Kerman, Iran, for two air mass flow rates of 0.006 kg/s and 0.01 kg/s. The acquired results illustrated that utilizing PCM improves daily thermal performance from 53.1% to 62.6%. Using PCMs with higher melting point temperature results in increasing the outlet temperature of SAHs almost 5 °C, as well as the daily performance of SAHs by approximately 3%. Furthermore, experimental runs prove that an arrangement with equally distributed PCM types with different melting points has the optimal daily thermal performance and shows approximately 5% improvement in thermal performance.