A Computational Study on Thermal and Sustainability Analysis of Solar Air Heater with S and Airfoil Tabulators

The solar air heater (SAH) harnesses solar energy and finds widespread application in various contexts, including drying agricultural products, heating spaces in buildings, etc.However, the viability of SAH has a problematic issue due to its low performance, which limits its applicability in actual applications.In this work, two distinct novel turbulators; namely, S-shape and Airfoil (NACA0018) turbulator have designed to take advantage of their flow structures to get enhanced performance of SAHs.The thermal analysis of rectangular SAH with a combination of S-shape and Airfoil (NACA0018) shape turbulators performed numerically.The operating and geometric parameters are : relative pitch (P/e) varied from 8 to14, angle of attack (α) varied from 0°-45°, and Reynolds number (Re) varied from 4000-16000.Both heat transfer and friction factor characteristics of SAH with turbulators show a significant improvement over smooth SAH.The maximum value of thermos-hydraulic performance is 2.21 which has been achieved at P/e=12, Re=12000 and α=30º.The exergetic analysis was also conducted, yielding a maximum exergetic efficiency of 2.25%.