EVALUATION OF CONVECTIVE HEAT TRANSFER COEFFICIENT AT DIFFERENT ALTITUDES IN ATMOSPHERIC REGIME USING FORCED CONVECTION

This article is present for a detailed investigation of the design Of solar air heater having difference size of rib on the absorber plate by using the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD).In this Solar air heater an absorber plate is made of ‘Aluminium’ and Roughened with difference size ribs due which creates the turbu lence in the flow of fluid (air) and increase the heat transfer from the absorber plate to the fluid. The commercial finite - volume based CFD code ANSYS FLUENT 14.5 is used to simulate turbulent airflow through artificially roughened solar air heater. The r esults predicted by the present CFD investigation are much closer to experimental results. It can, therefore be concluded that the present numerical results have demonstrated the validity of the proposed system. Thus it is possible to establish a validated model for the prediction of heat transfer and fluid flow phenomena in artificially roughened solar air heater. In order to predict performance of the system, Nusselt number and friction factor correlations have been developed by using the data generated u nder CFD based investigation