Numerical analysis of thermal efficiency of solar air collector

The sun plays a vital role in human needs such as food drying and heating from past to present as a renewable energy source. Researchers produce new efficiency-enhancing solutions each day for the systems with solar energy usage. One of these systems is solar air collectors. In this study, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of a previously experimentally investigated solar air collector was performed, and the performance variation of the collector was investigated in the case of using different absorber plate surface geometries. The numerical study herein contains the investigation of a 190x90x10 cm double pass solar air collector with V-type absorber plate surface geometry. The thermal performances of the absorber plate type with two different geometries for the same collector were investigated with the help of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses regarding the experimental examination present in the current literature. Rosseland Radiation Module (RRM) of ANSYS FLUENT student version was used in CFD analysis. The significance of this module is that it uses a sunray tracking algorithm. As a result of CFD analysis, the best thermal performance was observed in HGK with sinus type absorber plate. The analysis results concluded that the geometry of the absorber plate plays an essential role in the solar air collector, and new models of absorber plate geometries were proposed in this context.