In this paper, a nanofluid-based solar collector duct equipped with baffles is examined numerically. Baffles are located on the back plate to guide nanofluid flow toward absorber plate for heat transfer enhancement purposes. Cu-water nanofluid with fixed flow rate and concentration in the baffled duct are investigated for thermohydraulic mechanisms. Baffles with different inclination angles, heights and pitches are considered in this study. Numerical simulations are performed using Ansys fluent software with verified results compared to those of an experiment in the literature. The results show that the baffle angle 60° causes the lowest thermohydraulic performance. Because in the angle range of 30 to 60° the heat transfer is less variable while the pressure loss increases sharply. At the baffle pitch of 40 mm, there is no reattachment point at the non-heated surface. At the angle of 90°, three eddies are formed around a baffle. The slope linear regression analysis yields that baffle height has the strongest effects on thermohydraulic performance followed by baffle pitch and baffle angle. Nanofluid pressure loss respectively increases with baffle height and baffle angle at the rate of 0.463675 and 0.0049607 while absorber plate temperature respectively decreases with the baffle height and baffle angle at the rate of -0.176746 and -0.001377. Flow patterns and isotherms of all the cases examined are presented and analyzed in this study.
In this paper, a solar air collector duct equipped with baffles on a back plate was numerically investigated. The Reynolds number (Re) was varied from 5000 to 20,000, the angle baffle (a) from 30° to 120°, the baffle spacing ratio (Pr) from 2 to 8, and the baffle blockage ratio (Br) from 0.375 to 0.75 to examine their effects on the Nusselt number (Nu), the friction factor (f), and the thermohydraulic performance parameter (η). The 2D numerical simulation used the standard k-ε turbulence model with enhanced wall treatment. The Taguchi method was used to design the experiment, generating an orthogonal array consisting of four factors each at four levels. The optimization results from the Taguchi method and CFD analysis showed that the optimal geometry of a = 90°, Pr = 6, and Br = 0.375 achieved the maximum η. The influence of Br on all investigated parameters was considerable because as Br increased, a larger primary vortex region was formed downstream of the baffle. At Re = 5000 and the optimal geometry parameters, a maximum η of 1.01 was reached. A baffle angle between 60° and 90° achieved a high Nusselt number due to the impingement heat transfer.
Proper determination of inclination angle of a flat tube may increase the overall heat transfer performance without extending heat transfer surface. In this paper, the inclined flat tube heat exchanger with plain fins is numerically investigated. The influence of flat tube inclination angle and Reynolds number on the thermo-hydraulic performance index was evaluated. Tube pitch, fin spacing and flat tube size are fixed. Solving 3D computational domain with the symmetric boundary condition is used to reduce computation time. The results show that when increasing the inclination angle of the flat tube from 0 to 45°, both heat transfer and pressure loss increase because the free area of air flow decreases leading to an increase in air velocity and impingement heat transfer. The variation of inclination angle from 0 to 15°, the increase in heat transfer is stronger than the increase in the pressure loss penalty, so the performance index reaches a maximum of 0.405 at the angle of 15°. Contours of temperature, pressure and velocity at different inclination angles are presented to clarify the thermo-hydraulic characteristics of finned-tube heat exchangers using inclined flat tubes. The current work yields heat transfer enhancement ability by adjusting inclination angle of a heat transfer flat tube.
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