CFD-Based Correlation Development for Artificially Roughened Solar Air Heater

A new CFD-based correlation for rib roughened solar air heater is presented in this paper. An absorber plate of SAH attached with transverse semicircular ribs is analyzed in this article. ANSYS Fluent v16 is utilized to analyze the turbulent airflow for different arrangements of rib. All results are based on CFD simulations. The analysis is performed within the pitch, P from 10 to 25 mm and Reynolds number, Re from 3800 to 18,000 limits. The resulting data is reduced into correlations using a linear stepwise regression algorithm. The developed correlations predict all the data for Nur and fr within ± 5% relative absolute deviation.