A Critical Review on Thermo-Hydraulic Performance of Wire Screen Matrix Packed Solar Air Heaters
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13052/dgaej2156-3306.3521Keywords:
Air heater, wire screen matrix, thermal efficiency, thermo- hydraulic performance.Abstract
Solar air heaters (SAHs) have an important role in applications such as space
heating and industrial drying worldwide. The packing of SAH bed not only
increases the heat transfer area but also increases the pumping power losses
thereby limiting the thermo-hydraulic performance. In the present study,
efforts have been made for a critical assessment of the literature dealing
with the impact of collector bed and operating parameters over thermal and
thermo-hydraulic performance for different configurations of wire screen
matrix packed SAH. The porosity of bed and mass flow rate of the air have a
major influence on the thermo-hydraulic performance of wire screen matrix
packed SAH. It is found that the enhancement in the volumetric heat transfer
coefficient due to a decrease in bed porosity is obtained at the expense of
increase in pumping power which ultimately affects the thermo-hydraulic
performance of wire screen matrix packed SAH. In general it is observed
that porosity is an important parameter that affects the thermo-hydraulic performance. It is seen that matrix having porosity 0.937 yields thermo-
hydraulic performance of 68% at mass flow rate 0.023 kg/s where as for the
same mass flow rate porosity of 0.887 results thermo-hydraulic performance
of only 42%.
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