Experimental study and numerical analysis of thermal performance of corrugated plate solar collector

Solar water heating systems, usually powered by flat plate collectors, have gained global popularity recently because of better economic viability than the electrical heating devices. They are proved to produce hot water of up to 100 °C above ambient temperature depending upon the season, location, solar intensity and collector design. The consequential limitation of the flat plate solar water collectors is the imperfect contact between the absorbing surface and fluid transport pipe. In this research work, an attempt has been made to experimentally and numerically analyze a newly designed corrugated plate solar collector characterized by its chevron corrugated (sinusoidally profiled) absorber surface and thereby improved the thermal contact. The numerical simulation of the collector has been performed by means of the Finite Volume Method (FVM) using ANSYS Fluent 18.1 software. Both the numerical and experimental results revealed that the sinusoidal corrugation provides increased bond conductance leading to an increased outlet temperature and reduced plate to fluid temperature difference and thereby an enhanced efficiency of the collector. The experimental and numerical results of collector outlet temperature and collector efficiency proved to be in a good agreement.