Simulation of an Indirect Solar Cabinet Dryer by Computational Fluid Dynamics

In the present study the computational fluid dynamics simulation of an indirect solar cabinet dryer with heat storage material under collector was developed for thefirst time. A fully coupled heat and mass transfer processes inside the solid and on the air phase were considered on the two dimensional model. FLUENTallows the user to define new field variables called User Defined Scalars (UDS). And some of the boundary conditions were modeled with User Defined Functions(UDF). The results show that the air flow velocity increases as the effective flow area reduces in the chimney and collector. The maximum and minimumvelocity is 3.68 m/s and 0.1 m/s respectively. The average of moisture was reduced from initial value72.8% to about 11.25% after 21 hours. The average of the relative error for developed model is estimated to be ±7.81%. These results reveal that the developed modelcould be used successfully for performance analysis of a cabinet solar dryer in unsteady state operation conditions

کلیدواژه ها:

Solar Cabinet Dryer ، CFD ، Simulation ، Model