Utilization of vortex flow pattern in the design of an efficient solar air heater

In this work, numerical and experimental analyses of a new model of circular solar air heater are carried out to examine the effect of employing vortex flow inside the air vessel of collector for convection enhancement. In three-dimensional numerical CFD-based analysis, the COMSOL Multi-physics is used to solve the flow equations for the turbulent forced convection airflow and conduction equation for the solid parts of the solar heater at different air mass flow rates in the range of 0.003 to 0.012 kg/s. In the calculation of turbulent stresses and heat fluxes, the RNG $\kappa -∊$ turbulence model is employed. The surface to surfaces (S2S) radiation model is used to consider the radiations emitted by the hot surfaces in collaboration with the energy equation. For validation, the theoretical findings are evaluated against the experiment. For the studied test cases with different values of solar irradiation and air mass flow rate, thermal efficiencies of up to 80 % are found. In comparison to the conventional rectangular-shaped solar air heaters with smooth ducts, more than 100 % increase in the value of thermal efficiency is delineated from the theoretical and experimental findings. This gain is attributed to the unique flow pattern in the developed solar collector.