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International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering

Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4, April 2013)

CFD Analysis of Solar Flat Plate Collector


Prof. P.W.Ingle1, Dr. A. A. Pawar2, Prof. B. D. Deshmukh3, Prof. K. C. Bhosale4
Assistant Professor Mechanical Engineering Department, S.R.E.S. College of Engineering, Kopargaon, Maharashtra, 2 Professor Mechanical Engineering Department, RSCOE, Thathwade, Pune, 3,4 Assistant Professor Mechanical Engineering Department, S.R.E.S. College of Engineering, Kopargaon, Maharashtra
Abstract - This thesis attempts to present numerical simulation of solar collector developed exclusively for grape drying. Solar drying of grapes is much feasible technically and economically. There has been a remarkable achievement in solar drying of grapes due to sustained research and development associated with the adoption of advanced technologies. Simulation is an important tool for design and operation control. For the designer of a drying system, simulation makes it possible to find the optimum design and operating parameters. For the designer of the control system, simulation provides a means to device control strategies and to analyze the effects of disturbances. In the present thesis the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool has been used to simulate the solar collector for better understanding the heat transfer capability. 3D model of the collector involving air inlet, wavy structured absorber plate,glass cover plate, and pebble block is modeled by ANSYS Workbench and the unstructured grid was created in ANSYS ICEM. The results were obtained by using ANSYS FLUENT software. The objective of this work is to compare theoretically and experimentally work done with the work done by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool with respect to flow and temperature distribution inside the solar collector. The outlet temperature of air is compared with experimental results and there is a good agreement in between them KeywordsSolar Collector, Drying, Temperature ANSYS, CFD
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I. INTRODUCTION Solar energy is the most considerable energy source in the world. Sun, which is 1.495x1011 (m) far from the earth and has a diameter of 1.39x109 (m), would emit approximately 1353 (W/m2) on to a surface perpendicular to rays, if there was no atmospheric layer. The world receives 170 trillion (KW) solar energy and 30% of this energy is reflected back to the space, 47% is transformed to low temperature heat energy, 23% is used for evaporation/rainfall cycle in the Biosphere and less than 0.5% is used in the kinetic energy of the wind, waves and photosynthesis of plants.

Solar energy systems consist of many parts. The most important part of these systems is the solar collector where the heat transfer from sun to absorber and absorber to fluid occurs. In order to affect the performance of these systems, generally modifications on solar collectors are performed. With the rapid development in civilization, man has increasingly become dependent on natural resources to satisfy his needs. Drying fruits and vegetables such as grapes, pepper, pawpaw, etc is one of those indispensable processes that require natural resources in the form of fuels. Solar dryer is fast becoming a preferred method of drying fruits, food grains considering the potential of saving significant amounts of conventional fuel. The major factor that limits the solar energy for drying application is that it is a cyclic time dependent energy source. Therefore, solar systems require energy storage to provide energy during the night and overcast periods. In addition, one of the major requirements in using solar energy for drying application is the development of a suitable drying unit, which should be fast and energy efficient[1]. Solar energy collectors are special kind of heat exchangers that transform solar radiation energy to internal energy of the transport medium. The major component of any solar system is the solar collector. Of all the solar thermal collectors, the flat plate collectors though produce lower temperatures, have the advantage of being simpler in design, having lower maintenance and lower cost. To obtain maximum amount of solar energy of minimum cost the flat plate solar air heaters with thermal storage have been developed. Solar air heater is type of solar collector which is extensively used in many applications such as residential, industrial and agricultural fields.[2] Solar collectors are the key component of active solarheating systems. They gather the sun's energy, transform its radiation into heat, then transfer that heat to a fluid (usually water or air). The solar thermal energy can be used in solar water-heating systems, solar pool heaters, and solar spaceheating systems.

337

International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering


Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4, April 2013) A. Flat-plate collectors Flat-plate collectors are the most common solar collector for solar water-heating systems in homes and solar space heating. A typical flat-plate collector is an insulated metal box with a glass or plastic cover (called the glazing) and a dark-colored absorber plate. These collectors heat liquid or air at temperatures less than 80C. The objective of present study is to perform CFD simulation of flat plate collector with air flow. The CFD model was validated with experimental results. Based on the results of the experiments CFD analysis of air on solar flat plate collector is carried out. There are certain limitations for experimental results thus data at each and every point cannot be obtained, hence CFD is the tool which handles complex situations where experimental is not applicable because of limitations and cost effectiveness problem. The overall aim of this work is to understand the flow and temperature distribution of air through solar flat plate collector[3]. II. PROBLEM STATEMENT The objective of present study is to perform CFD simulation for solar air collector. The results obtained by CFD simulation are been validated with experimental results.The experimental conditions taken for solar air collector, the same has been used for CFD simulation. The overall aim of this work is to understand the flow behavior and temperature distribution of air inside the solar collector and compare the outlet temperature of air with experimental results. The 3D model consisting of the solar air collector involving air inlet, wavy structured absorber plate , glass cover plate, and pebble block is model by ANSYS Workbench and the unstructured grid was created in ANSYS ICEM. The results were obtained by using ANSYS FLUENT software The overall dimension for solar air collector is 2000X1000X130 mm3 with 4 mm thick glass plate which is placed at around 126 mm from the top side of the collector. The wavy structured absorber plate of 2000 mm length, 1000 mm wide and 2 mm in thickness. Inlet of solar air collector is of circular cross section with diameter of 70 mm. There are two outlets to the solar collector with circular cross section having diameter 60 mm.

Fig.1 Isometric view of Solar flat plate collector

III. NUMERICAL S IMULATION B Y SOFTWARE Computational system dynamics is the analysis of the systems involving fluid flow, heat transfer and associated phenomenon such as chemical reactions by means of computer-based simulation. The technique is very powerful and spans a wide range of industrial and non-industrial applications areas. Some examples are: aerodynamics of aircrafts and vehicles, hydrodynamics of ships, combustion, turbo machinery, electrical and electronic engineering, chemical process engineering, external and internal environment of buildings, marine engineering, environmental engineering, hydrology and oceanography, metrology, biomedical engineering etc. from the 1960s onwards, the aerospace industry has integrated CFD technique into design, R & D and manufacture of aircrafts and jet engines. More recently the methods have been applied to the design of internal combustion engines, combustion chambers of gas turbines and furnaces. Furthermore, motor manufacturers now routinely predict drag forces, under bonnet airflow and the in-car environment with CFD. Increasingly CFD is becoming a vital component in the design of industrial products and processes. The ultimate aim of development in the CFD field is to provide a capability comparable to other CAE (ComputerAided Engineering) tools such as stress analysis codes.

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International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering


Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4, April 2013) The main reason why CFD has lagged behind is the tremendous complexity of the underlying behavior, which precludes a description of the fluid flows this is at the same time economical and sufficiently complete. The availability of affordable high performance computing hardware and the introduction of user friendly interference have led to a recent upsurge of interest and CFD is poised to make an entry into the wider industrial community in the 1990s. Clearly the investment costs of a CFD capability are not small, but the total expense is not normally as great as that of a high quality experimental facility. Moreover, there are several unique advantages of CFD over experimental-based approaches to fluid systems design. 1. Substantial reduction of lead times and costs of new design. 2. Ability to study systems where controlled experimental are difficult or impossible to perform. (e.g. very large systems) 3. Ability to study systems under hazardous conditions at and beyond their normal performance limits. (e.g. safety studies and accident scenarios) 4. Practically unlimited level of detail of results. In contrast CFD codes can produce extremely large volumes of results at virtually no added expense and it is very cheap to perform parametric studies, for instance to optimize equipment performance[4]. A. Basics in CFD CFD codes are structured around the numerical algorithms that can tackle fluid flow problems. In order to provide easy asses to their solving power all commercial CFD packages include sophisticated user interfaces to input problem parameters and to examine the results. Hence all code contains three main elements: 1. Pre-processor 2. Solver 3. Post-processor B. Numerical Modeling of solar air collector The procedure adopted to simulate the solar air collector by CFD tool is as follows: a. The 3D model is been modeled by using ANSYS WORKBENCH software as shown in Fig.2 b. After creation of 3D model, the unstructured grid is been created by using ANSYS ICEM software as shown in fig 3 and fig.4 c. The unstructured grid created consist around 1.5 crore elements.
Fig.2. 3D model of solar air collector visualizing the absorber plate

d. The unstructured grid which is created then imported in ANSYS FLUENT software and the experimental conditions are used while simulating the solar air collector. e. The model was defined by using 3D segregated solver with steady condition, energy equation, and K-epsilon of viscous model. f. The fluid chosen to simulate solar collector is air. The air properties used in this simulation is shown in table no.1 g. The boundary conditions used in this simulation are shown in table no.2 and 3. h. After setting all boundary conditions in fluent software, to solve the numerical equations the initialization by inlet is to be done. i. To visualize the residuals of iterations verses convergence limit, the residual monitor is set to be in ON state condition. j. To get the final results the numbers of iterations are set around 10000. The results for these simulations were converged at around 4000 to 6000 iterations. k. As the number of elements are more to get the converged results the time taken for these simulations will be more with single processor. l. Finally after getting the proper converged results the air flow distribution and heat transfer inside the solar air collector is been plotted in the form of Contour plots. m. The outlet temperature is been calculated from ANSYS FLUENT after getting converged results and been compared with the experimental results.

339

International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering


Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4, April 2013)
TABLE 2 PROPERTIES OF PEBBLE BLOCK

Property Density Thermal Conductivity Specific Heat

Value 1350 Kg/m3 100 W/m K 300-600 J/kg K

TABLE 3 PROPERTIES OF GLASS

Property Density Thermal Conductivity Specific Heat


Fig.3 3D mesh of Solar Flat Plate Collector

Value 1000 Kg/m3 1.75 W/m K 910 J/kg K

C. Assumptions considered for simulation

Fig. 4 Meshing by using ANSYS fLUENT TABLE 1. PROPERTIES OF AIR

1. Air is used as working fluid, it is compressible fluid. 2. Problem is considered 3D and steady state. 3. Surface considered in geometry are smooth air flow over it is frictionless. 4. Ambient temperature is considered constant. 5. Flow is assumed to be turbulent. 6. Turbulence specification method of turbulent intensity and viscosity ratio with 5 % and 10 respectively. By default these values are can be taken 3 % and 3 respectively or calculated as per model. Here it is been assumed that turbulence will be more so approximately value has been taken by doing trial and error for convergence of model results[5]. IV. RESULT AND D ISCUSSION

Property Mass flow rate of air Density Thermal Conductivity Specific Heat

Value 0.0105 Kg/sec 1.165 kg/m3 100 W/m K 1005 J/kg K

The results obtained from the CFD analysis of solar flat plate collector are presented in this section. The simulation is carried out for different times of the day i.e.9 am to 5 pm. Then the results obtained by this simulation compared with the experimental results as shown in fig 4. The curves are plotted to indicate experimental and simulated outlet temperatures versus time. From fig 4 it seems that the difference between experimental and simulated outlet temperature for different times is almost 5C.

340

International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering


Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4, April 2013)
TABLE 4 COMPARISON OF EXPERIMENTAL AND CFD RESULTS Time Hrs Solar Intensity (W/m2) Ambient temperature (0C) Collector temperature obtained by CFD(0C) 60.87 73.75 85.34 93.38 96.10 93.40 84.84 68.14 43.06 Collector temperature (0C)

9 am 10 am 11 am 12 1 pm 2 pm 3 pm 4 pm 5 pm

621.7 750.5 879.5 909 948 909.5 790 597.5 357

32.5 34.7 37 38.9 38.5 41.1 40 35 33

55.7 60.5 67.4 76.5 78.1 75.2 68.8 60.3 42 Fig.5(a) Streamlines for temperature distribution

Fig.5(b) Streamlines for temperature distribution at 9 am of the day

Graph 1. Comparison of CFD and experimental results for day1

Also the temperature distribution and flow distribution are obtained by CFD simulation. The contour plots obtained for temperature distribution and velocity distribution in streamlines are shown in fig 5(a), 5(b), 5(c), 5(d).
Fig.5(c) Streamlines for velocity distribution

341

International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering


Website: www.ijetae.com (ISSN 2250-2459, ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4, April 2013) REFERENCES
[1] D.R.Pangavhane, R.L.Sawhney, Review of research & development work on solar dryers for grape drying, energy conversation and management 43(2002) 45-61 Decho Thueaktphum, Kittitep Fuenkajorn, A rock fills based solar thermal energy storage for housing, SienceAsia 36(1010) 237 -243 Mohamed Selmi, Mohammed J. Al-Khawaja and Abdulhamid Marafia, Validation of CFD simulation for flat plate solar energy collector, Renewable Energy 33 (2008) 383387 . Kumaresan G, Iniyan S and Velraj R, Experimental and CFD analysis of a solar based cooking unit, Institute for Energy Studies, CEG Anna University, Chennai - 600025, India. Fabio Struckmann, Analysis of a Flat-plate Solar Collector, 2008 MVK160 Heat and Mass Transport ,May 08, 2008, Lund, Sweden . K. Vasudeva Karanth, Manjunath M. S. and N. Yagnesh Sharma, Numerical Simulation of a Solar Flat Plate Collector using Discrete Transfer Radiation Model (DTRM) A CFD Approach, Proceedings of the World Congress on Engineering 2011 Vol III,WCE 2011, July 6 - 8, 2011, London, U.K. David Luna, Yves Jannot, Jean-Pierre Nadeau, An oriented-design simplified model for the efficiency of a flat plate solar air collector, Applied thermal engineering 30 (2010) 2808-2814 G. D. Rai, Solar Energy Utilization, Khanna Publishers, page no. 156- 199

[2] [3]

[4]

Fig.5(d) Streamlines for velocity distribution at time 9am of day

[5] [6]

V. CONCLUSION There is a good agreement between the experimental and simulated results for outlet air temperatures. Although there are some small discrepancies due to some experimental imperfectness matters, we still have a good confidence in the CFD simulation program that can be used in the future for more complex solar collector problem. It is found from the CFD analysis that the flow of air in the solar flat plate collector is not properly distributed. In order to overcome this issue we can introduce baffles at the inlet of collector which improves the efficiency of of solar flat plate collector.

[7]

[8]

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