Eventos Anais de eventos
ENCIT 2016
16th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
Numerical Analysis of Heat Transfer Performance of Flat Plate Solar Collectors
Submission Author:
Gilberto Augusto Amado Moreira , PB
Presenter: Gilberto Augusto Amado Moreira
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2016.CIT2016-0301
Abstract
Solar energy is becoming an alternative for the limited fossil fuel resources. One of the simplest and most direct applications of this energy is the conversion of solar radiation into heat, which can be used in water heating systems. A commonly used solar collector is the flat-plate. A lot of research has been conducted in order to analyze the flat-plate operation and improve its efficiency. This study presents a three-dimensional mathematical model for simulating the transient processes which occur in flat-plate liquid solar collectors. The differential equations were solved by the finite volume method in an iterative scheme using a CFD methodology for the commercial code ANSYS CFX. In order to evaluate the proposed method, an experiment was designed and conducted for several days under ambient conditions and flow rates. The comparison between the numerical and measured results of the transient fluid temperature at the collector outlet showed a satisfactory convergence. The proposed method is appropriate for the verification of the absorber and glass cover effectiveness, in addition to calculate the overall efficiency of the system along with the overall heat loss factor.
Keywords
Solar Energy, Flat Plate Solar Collector, Thermal performance, Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
