Efficiency Evaluation and Comparison of Different Turbulator Shapes in Solar Water Heating Collector System

Solar flat plate collector is mostly used for the heating purposes like heating of water or any fluid and also used for heating the space or drying purpose. The solar flat plate collector is one of the best methods for the utilization of renewable source of energy. The main component which we use for the fabrication of solar flat plate collector is Absorber tubes (whether it may be aluminium, copper or any other material depending upon the thermal conductivity of material), Glazing, Insulation, wooden box or housing enclosing whole assembly. The absorber tubes used high thermal conductivity materials made of copper material for absorbing the maximum solar radiation. The absorber sheet/plate is also placed inside the wooden box and is coated with black paint and make it black body for the absorption of maximum solar radiation. The glass (thickness 5mm) is also used for reducing the loss of solar radiation from the wooden box/whole assembly. One interesting point here is that we install turbulator inside the absorber tubes for converting the laminar flow to turbulance flow. Here we use the two turbulators, first one is coil-spring turbulator and other one is Twisted tape turbulator. Now vary the length and twist/turn of turbulator and is installed in the absorber tubes for destructing the boundary layer inside the tubes. The objective of the present study is to evaluate the performance of flat plate collector with different geometric absorber configuration. It is expected that with the same collector space higher thermal efficiency or higher water temperature can be obtained. A testing setup is fabricated and performing the experiment taking a different parameter to study the heat enhancement of flat plate collector.