Analytical and experimental investigation on jet impingement solar air heater

Abstract

Solar energy conversion technologies are well suitable for satisfying the rapidly growing energy requirements in industrial as well as domestic sectors Sun is the most important reliable source of energy and energy conversion process can satisfy the future energy needs and also not influenced by geopolitical crises A wide range of solar thermal energy conversion applications such as solar cooking solar desalination solar water heating space heating solar drying and solar air heating etc are in practice Solar Air Heaters SAHs are one of the important thermal energy converting devices which heat the air by converting and transferring the absorbed solar insolation They are very simple in design manufacture and easier to maintain and also have three to four times of energy conversion rate compared with solar PV collectors Even though the system consists of its own merits the total installed capacity of solar air collectors is only 0 3 This happens due to that lower thermal efficiency of the Solar Air Heater SAH caused by poor heat newlinetransfer coefficient between air and absorber plate To improve the efficiency various configurations of solar air heaters are analysed In this present work the thermal performance of the solar air heater is improved by a new design of parallel pass SAH In this design the upper air flow path integrated with artificial roughness and lower air flow path uses jet impingement technique for improving the convective heat transfer This type of SAH is named as Single Pass Double Duct SPDD jet impingement solar air heater integrated with artificial roughness newline newline