THERMAL SCIENCE

International Scientific Journal

Fahad Sarfraz Butt

,

Abdul Waheed Badar

,

Ajaz Bashir Janjua

,

M. Salman Siddiqui

COMPUTATIONAL STUDY OF LAMINAR FREE CONVECTION INSIDE TILTING IRREGULAR CAVITY OF A BATCH-TYPE SOLAR COLLECTOR

ABSTRACT
Batch-type solar collector is a tilt-able water-heating solar-thermal system comprising an isosceles-trapezoidal enclosure housing a circular-cylinder absorber at the bottom wall, insulated side-walls, and flat-top glazing. Free convection of air inside such trapezoidal enclosure is studied numerically by varying the tilt angle of the whole enclosure from 0°-70°. The influence of tilt on the flow field has been demonstrated by plotting the streamlines and isotherms. The present study successfully identifies the importance of enclosure-tilt in quantifying heat-loss between absorber and glazing by developing a computational correlation between Nusselt and Rayleigh as a function of tilt. The correlation trend is non-monotonic over the range of angular Rayleigh numbers numerically experimented with having a peak around angular Rayleigh number 3⋅105 corresponding to the tilt-angle 30°. The irregular-shaped cavity implies that the heat transfer correlations already existing for regular-shaped cavities may not be used otherwise they will draw implausible conclusions and this argument identifies the novelty of the present study.
KEYWORDS
Batch-type solar collector, trapezoidal enclosure, Rayleigh number, free convection, tilt angle
PAPER SUBMITTED: 2020-05-21
PAPER REVISED: 2021-02-03
PAPER ACCEPTED: 2021-02-03
PUBLISHED ONLINE: 2021-03-13
DOI REFERENCE: https://doi.org/10.2298/TSCI200521078B
CITATION EXPORT: view in browser or download as text file
THERMAL SCIENCE YEAR 2022, VOLUME 26, ISSUE Issue 1, PAGES [423 - 435]
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Computational study of laminar free convection inside tilting irregular cavity of a batch-type solar collector

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