EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ON SOLAR ALUMINIUM CAN AIR HEATER WITH AND WITHOUT LATENT HEAT STORAGE

The current paper investigates the performance studies on solar aluminium can air heater (SCAH) with and without latent heat storage. For this a solar can air heater was fabricated with recyclable aluminium cans and integrated with latent thermal heat storage (LTHS). Paraffin wax (phase changing material) was used as latent thermal storage medium. The experiments were carried out with and without LTHS system under three different mass flow rates 0.015 Kg/s, 0.022 Kg/s and 0.036 Kg/s. The experiments were conducted in clean days of March and April 2018 , Andhra Pradesh. Comparatively, the efficiency and exit air temperatures of the SCAH using latent thermal heat storage are higher than the solar can air heater without thermal storage system. The efficiency difference between SCAH with and without PCM is decreases with increase in mass flow rate. Among all three experiments SCAH with PCM produce maximum efficiency when mass flow rate was 0.036 Kg/s.