COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS ANALYSIS OF SOLAR AIR HEATER EFFICIENCY WITH CORRUGATED ABSORBER PLATES IN ALKHARJ, SAUDI ARABIA

In this article, we investigated the performance of a solar air heater. Solar air heaters use solar energy to heat the air in various heating systems. Our study is on August 15 in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia. For analyzing the performance of the solar air heater, we examined different hours during one day. So, we select different hours from 8 am to 4 pm. The proposed solar heater consists of an absorber plate and a glass cover. The absorber, the most important component in the heating system, has a Corrugated construction with a Chevron design. At different hours, we compare the thermal performance by two different configurations. Once, we considered a flat solar heater, and the other, an inclined solar heater with an angle of 30 degrees. In this study, we performed the numerical simulation using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) via Ansys Fluent software. Therefore, we used the Discrete Ordinates (DO) radiation model to consider radiative heat transfer and the Solar Ray Tracing model to apply solar irradiation. The results confirmed that both in the flat and the inclined absorber cases, the incident radiation has the greatest effect on the thermal performance of the solar air heater.