Paper Title
CFD Analysis of Solar Flat Plate Collector with Semi Circular Baffles
Abstract
The heat transfer enhancement is very important in many engineering applications to increase the efficiency of solar flat plate collectors. The active techniques require external power like surface vibrations, electrical fields etc. and the passive techniques are those which does not require any external power. Our research involves a solar flat plate collector setup whose risers were designed with two variants namely a riser without inserts and a riser with semicircular baffles. The major aim of the research is to create a turbulent flow of water in the riser so that more efficient heat transfer takes place thereby increasing the efficiency of the entire system by CFD analysis using ANSYS FLUENT. Post analysis, a significant rise in temperature was achieved thereby proving that an increase in turbulence has led to an increase in heat transfer rate of the system.
Index Terms - CFD, Solar flat plate collectors , Semicircular baffles , augmentation techniques.