Author(s)

Ramadhani Bakari

Department of Petroleum and Energy Engineering, University of Dodoma, Dodoma, Tanzania.

This paper presents an experimental analysis for comparisons of conventional flat plate solar collectors and collectors integrated with different numbers of baffles. Heat transfer between absorber plate and drying fluid (air) has been one of the major challenges in the design and operations of the indirect solar dryer systems. In this experiment, efficiency of air flat plate solar collector integrated with 2, 3, 4 and 8 baffles was studied and compared with the ordinary collector. The results showed that integrating solar collector with baffles significantly increased the efficiency of the system. It was noted that collector with 2, 3, 4 and 8 baffles had a mean efficiency of 29.2%, 31.3%, 33.1% and 33.7% respectively while with no baffles was 28.9%. The analysis showed that when there were less than four baffles in the collector, heat transfer was dominant over pressure drop and hence high efficiency. However, when the number of baffles exceeded four, the effect associated with an increase in pressure drop highly observed compared to heat transfer coefficient, thus resulted to insignificant increase in efficiency. Therefore, the optimum number of four baffles was commended for the designed model for optimum efficiency.

Solar Collector, Solar Dryer, Sun Drying, Collector Efficiency, Heat Transfer

Bakari, R. (2018) Heat Transfer Optimization in Air Flat Plate Solar Collectors Integrated with Baffles. Journal of Power and Energy Engineering, 6, 70-84. doi: 10.4236/jpee.2018.61006.