Conical Solar Collector Project Description

Solar energy is the largest source of energy in the world. This energy is clean, cheap, and endless and can be found all over the world. Solar water heaters work by absorbing solar energy from collector plates, and their heating efficiency varies by type of collector. To provide hot water during the day and the night, hot water is kept in a double-sided reservoir with thermal insulation that can keep the water temperature for up to three days without any changes in its temperature.

In this project, heat transfer in a Conical Solar Collector CFD Simulation containing water fluid is carried out and analyzed by ANSYS Fluent software. The cubic computational domain consists of an air inlet (velocity inlet type, 1m/s) and a pressure outlet. The conical collector consists of an water inlet (inlet velocity, 0.01 m/s) and a pressure outlet. It also has 1 layer of glass and 1 layer of steel to decrease convection heat transfer as much as possible. The conical solar collector absorbs the sunlight and warms the water inside its tank.

The geometry for analyzing this simulation consists of a fluid domain and a conical solar collector. The geometry is designed in SpaceClame® and is meshed in ANSYS meshing®. The mesh type used for this geometry is unstructured and the element number is 2948101.

Methodology

The energy and radiation model (solar ray tracing model with DO model) are activated and the k-ε model with the use of standard wall function is exploited for fluid flow analysis.

Results of Conical Solar Collector

Contours of velocity, temperature, streamlines are presented.

The average temperature of the collector walls reaches 308.67 K, and the water that enters the collector at a temperature of 298.15 K is warmed up inside the collector, with an outlet temperature of 306.8 K.

Total heat transfer through the collector wall is 773 watt.