PERFORMANCE 'EVALUATION OF TWO PASS SOLAR AIR HEATERS

Abstract

As solar air heater is a simple device to heat air by utilizing solar energy. As a low temperature energy source it has many applications. Therefore it has attracted many investigators to investigate the performance of solar air heaters. Several analytical and experimentalinvestigations have been carried out to study the effects of various system and operating parameters on the thermal performance of solar air heaters. It was proposed to study the effects of system and operating parameters on the performance of two- pass flow solar air heaters. From an experimental setup data irecollected for obtaining the thermal efficiency of two- pass flow solar air heater with matrix and without matrix. From the analysis of the collected data, the results are discussed and presented in the form of plots. It has been found that thermal efficiency of two- pass flow solar air heater with matrix is more than the efficiency of the two- pass flow solar air heater without matrix under the same operating conditions.