• Transactions of the Korean hydrogen and new energy society
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.331-338
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• 2015

Solar air heaters (SAHs) are simple in design and widely used for solar energy collection devices, and a packed bed is one of typical solar energy storage systems of thermal energy captured by SAHs. This paper presents mathematical modeling and simulation on the thermal performance of various packed bed energy storage systems. A MATLAB program is used to estimate the thermal efficiency of packed bed SAH. Among the various packed bed energy storage systems considered, the wire mesh screen packed bed SAH shows the best thermal efficiency over the entire range of design conditions. The maximum of thermal efficiency of packed bed SAH with wire mesh screen matrices has been found to be 0.794 for Re=2000 - 20000 and ${\Delta}T/I=0.002-0.02$.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.43-55
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• 2015

This paper presents the thermal hydraulic performance of a three dimensional rib-roughened solar air heater (SAH) duct with the one principal wall subjected to uniform heat flux. The SAH duct has aspect ratio of 12.0 and the Reynolds number ranges from 2000 to 12000. The roughness has relative rib height of 0.045, ratio of dimple depth to print diameter of 0.5 and rib pitch ratio of 8.0. The flow attack angle is varied from $35^{\circ}$ to $70^{\circ}$. Various turbulent flow models are used for the heat transfer and fluid flow analysis and their results are compared with the experimental results for smooth surfaces. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results based on the renormalization k-epsilon model are in better outcomes compared with the experimental data. This model is used to calculate heat transfer and fluid flow in SAH duct with the compound roughness of V-shaped ribs and dimples. The overall thermal performance based on equal pumping power is found to be the highest (2.18) for flow attack angle of $55^{\circ}$. The thermo-hydraulic performance for V-pattern shaped ribs combined with dimple ribs is higher than that for dimple rib shape and V-pattern rib shape air duct.