CFD Study on Thermohydraulic Performance Enhancement of Solar Flat Plate Air Heaters Using Novel Turbulators

The performance of solar flat plate air heaters (SFPAHs) are controlled by the fundamentally poor convective heat transfer coefficient of air. To overcome this, current research recommends a novel turbulator integrated SFPAH to augment the thermohydraulic performance (THP) of an SFPAH equipped with a smooth absorber plate (SAP). Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were made by means of ANSYS 2025 R2 Fluent for the following mass flow rates 0.01, 0.02 and 0.03 kg/s. Key contours (velocity, temperature, pressure, and turbulent kinetic energy) were analyzed to investigate the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics. The proposed novel turbulator increased turbulence, upheld secondary flow structures, disturbed the boundary layer, causing improved heat transfer with a tolerable pressure penalty. Also, the current research validates the practicability of the suggested passive enhancement technique for improving SFPAH performance.