Performance of Passive Evaporative Cooling Tower Driven by Solar Chimney with Porous Absorber
Author(s):
Suhaib J. Shbailat† , Mohammed A. Nima‡
Affiliation(s):
† Department of Biomedical Engineering, Al-Esraa University College, Baghdad, Iraq
‡ Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Numerical study has been done for testing the thermal performance and the thermal behavior enhancement of solar chimney that can be achieved by adding metal foam. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used for solving the governing equations of flow and heat transfer for f models of solar chimney. ANSYS FLUENT 14.5 software was employed for solving it which using the control volume numerical technique. This study’s numerical component involves the different inclination angles (30 ͦ, 45 ͦ, 60 ͦ and 75 ͦ), with the optimum position being found when it provides the best thermal performance. The governing equations and radiation heat transfer equations are solved using a finite volume modeling technique, which is implemented through the use of the ANSYS Fluent software package (version 14.5). It was discovered that the presence of metal foam (10 & 40) PPI absorber plates improved heat transfer, resulting in an increase in air velocity at the solar chimney of approximately (13.3% and 5.3%, respectively) at the highest inclination angle (60°) as opposed to the presence of conventional flat absorber plates. Additionally, the results revealed that the 10 PPI absorber plate produces results that are superior to those obtained with the 40 PPI absorber plate in all cases. Evaporative cooling mode lead to good results. Where, the room temperature is still lower than the outside condition temperature, by approximately 3.2-4.7℃. The successful conditions for these modes are limited by the low relative humidity, high solar radiation and the induce air from high intensity arid area. The enhancement in the relative humidity at evaporative cooling mode in the room for 10 PPI absorber plate to about 15.3 % at inclination angle (60°) if compared with the flat absorber plate at the same inclination angle.