Improvement of PVT air-cooling by the integration of a chimney tower (CT/PVT)

•A numerical modeling of a new concept CT/PVT was developed.•The optimal design of the new hybrid system has been obtained.•Improvement of the heat transfer rate by around 78.13% compared to the conventional case. In this work, a bi-dimensional numerical simulation of the turbulent natural convectio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied thermal engineering 2018-01, Vol.129, p.1181-1188
Main Authors: Boutina, L., Khelifa, A., Touafek, K., Lebbi, M., Baissi, M.T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aerodynamics
Chimney tower
Computational fluid dynamics
Computer simulation
Convection cooling
Cooling
Cooling towers
Fluid flow
Free convection
Geometrical optimisation
Heat transfer
Heat transfer rate
Hybrid systems
K-epsilon turbulence model
Mathematical models
Navier-Stokes equations
Numerical simulation
Parameters
Photovoltaic/thermal solar collector (PVT)
Simulation
Solar energy
Turbulent natural convection
Variations
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Summary:•A numerical modeling of a new concept CT/PVT was developed.•The optimal design of the new hybrid system has been obtained.•Improvement of the heat transfer rate by around 78.13% compared to the conventional case. In this work, a bi-dimensional numerical simulation of the turbulent natural convection for cooling of the solar panel in a new concept of hybrid photovoltaic/thermal solar collector by integration of a chimney tower has been analysed. The hydrodynamic flow field is governed by the Navier–Stokes equations in the fluid region, thermal field by the energy equation. The standard k-ε turbulence model is used for describing the turbulent fluctuations of velocities and scalar quantities. The Influences of the dimensionless geometric parameters, such as the collector diameter ratio (Dc∗), the absorber length (La∗) and the chimney tower diameter ratio and the chimney tower height (Dt∗, Ht∗) on the flow features and heat transfer rate are presented. The obtained results show that the optimum dimensionless geometrical parameters of the new hybrid system proposed (La∗=0.625, Dc∗=3, Ht∗=0.625, and Dt∗=2) produce an improvement in the heat transfer rate of 78.13% compared to the base case, for Ra=5×106. Correlations of the average Nusselt numbers are obtained and discussed.
ISSN:1359-4311
1873-5606
DOI:10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2017.10.097