Effects of Y-shaped Ribs on Heat Transfer Performance and Pressure Drop of a Solar Air Heater

초록

The present work proposes Y-shaped ribs as obstacles attached to the heat absorber plate in a rectangular solar air heater to promote heat transfer. The thermal and aerodynamic performance of the solar heater was numerically evaluated using three-dimensional Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations with the shear stress transport (SST) turbulence model. A parametric study was performed using three geometric parameters of the ribs. The area-averaged Nusselt number and friction factor were selected as the performance parameters of the solar air heater to evaluate the performances related to heat transfer and friction loss, respectively. In addition, the performance factor was defined as the ratio of the area-averaged Nusselt number to the friction factor. Compared with T-shaped ribs, the Y-shaped ribs optimized in this work showed up to 7.6% higher performance factor.

키워드