Investigation of thermal performance and entropy generation rate of evacuated tube collector solar air heater with inserted baffles and metal foam: A CFD approach

Moslem Abrofarakh and Hamid Moghadam

Renewable Energy, 2024, vol. 223, issue C

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of metal foam embedding into evacuated tube collector solar air heaters with inserted baffle (IBMF-ETC-SAH) on the device thermal performance using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. A three-dimensional model is employed to analyze the system under steady-state conditions. The key finding of this study is that the utilization of metal foam leads to a substantial increase in thermal performance, with an average improvement of approximately 300 %. The investigation examines the influence of metal foam porosity and pores per inch (PPI) on the performance of the IBMF-ETC-SAH across Reynolds numbers ranging from 6000 to 18,000. The results indicate that increasing the PPI from 20 to 40 at a constant porosity of 0.93 has negligible effects on device performance. However, the pressure drop increases by 48 % for a PPI of 40 compared to a PPI of 20. Furthermore, reducing the porosity from 0.95 to 0.9 leads to a 7 % enhancement in thermal performance. The IBMF-ETC-SAH exhibits a significant decrease in the total global entropy generation rate (EGR) compared to the device without metal foam. The maximum value of total EGR for the IB-ETC-SAH case is 2.32 times higher than the corresponding values for the IBMF-ETC-SAH case.

Keywords: Solar air heater; Evacuated tube collector; Metal foam; Porosity; Pore per inch; Laminar sublayer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:223:y:2024:i:c:s0960148124000879

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2024.120022

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