Augmentation of Effective Thermal Gain of Solar Air Heater using a Novel Turbulator Design- A CFD Study

¹ Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal- 576104, India.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering and IT, Manipal University, Dubai, UAE.

^* Corresponding author: manjunathnitc@gmail.com

Abstract

Augmentation of thermal performance of solar air heater has been the focus of many researchers over the last decades and the use of turbulator or artificial roughness to provide increased fluid mixing in order to achieve augmented heat transfer has been a widely accepted technique. This work aims to evaluate the effect of a novel turbulator design on the effective thermal performance of solar air heater using the methodology of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). A two dimensional CFD analysis is carried out to evaluate the thermal characteristics of solar air heater at various flow Reynolds number conditions for different geometric parameters of the proposed turbulator design. The pitch of the turbulator is varied as 10mm, 20mm, 30mm, 40mm and 50mm for a fixed turbulator height of 2 mm. The Reynolds number is varied from 6,000 to 27,000. The analysis shows that the lower values of pitch produces higher improvement in heat transfer. The maximum increase in Nusselt number is found to be about 2.98 times as compared to the base model for the flow Reynolds number of about 6000. The highest increase in the friction factor is found to be about 3.05 times relative to the base model. The maximum thermal enhancement factor is found to be about 1.99 for the pitch value of 10 mm at a flow Reynolds number of about 6000.