Experimental Investigation of Double Pass Solar Air Heater with V-Corrugated Plate, Phase Change Material and Baffles Under Recycling Operation

Abstract

The current paper presents an experimental work which had been implemented to observe the performance of an improved solar air heater and compared it with that of a conventional double-pass flat plate solar air heater. Improvements that have been added include the use of a Vshaped corrugated plate at an angle of 60 degrees, the addition of wood baffles in the lower pass and the use of phase-changing materials PCM as well as air recycling conditions. The heater was designed and tested under the weather conditions prevailing in the Duhok Governorate (latitude 36° 52' 1.52" N and longitude 42° 59' 18.42" E) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The phase-changing material PCM is paraffin wax. The gathered results showed that the improvements that were added to the solar air heater significantly improved the performance at different mass flow values (0.037, 0.057, 0.077 kg/sec). For example, the improvement in useful heat transfer was about 56% at 0.057 kg/s.

Keywords: Solar Air Heater, PCM, recycle rate, V- corrugated absorber plate