ANALYSIS THE PERFORMANCE AND EFFECTS OF ARTIFICIAL ROUGHNESS WITH VARIOUS RIBS ARRANGEMENT ON THE ABSORBER PLATE OF SOLAR AIR HEATER

Energy requirement is very important in our life. Today, every country draws its energy needs from a variety of sources. we can broadly categorize these sources as comercial and noncommercial. The commercial sources include the fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, while the noncommercial sources include wood, animal wastes and agricultural wastes. In past few years, it has become obvious that fossil fuel resources are fast depleting and the fossil fuel era is gradually coming to an end. This is particularly true for oil and natural gas. Energy expenditue is constantly increasing all over the world, and we have very little source of energy. So in such a situation, we need to find alternate source of energy. Till this time, it would not be wrong to say that the sun was supplying all the energy needs of man either directly or indirectly. As we know the energy resources available on the earth are in various forms like sunlight, fossil fuels, hydraulic energy, wind energy, tidal energy, geothermal energy and nuclear energy etc. we are having basically two types of energy resources i.e. conventional and nonconventional energy resources. From the point of view of energy saving and fulfill of present and future demand, the best option is renewable energy. We know that Sun is the ultimate source of energy and it is easilly available on the earth in free of cost. Solar energy is used in many areas for different purposes like heat and cool buildings, to heat water, to operate engines etc. So we have best option for provide heat for various purposes is Solar Air Heater. Artificial roughness, which is mounted on the absorber plate, play important role for enhancement of heat transfer rate in order to improve the thermal performance of solar air heater. In this paper our aim is to increase the thermal performance of solar air heater using artificial roughness with different shape of ribs arrangement roughness.