الفهرس 
INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEWOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Solar air heaters (SAHs) are highly effective technique for converting solar irradiance into thermal energy for a wide range of heating applications. Numerous studies were previously focused on improving the heat transfer of flat plate solar air heaters due to their poor thermal performance. Using experimental and computational analysis, this research investigates the impact of using a sinusoidal corrugated absorber plate on the heat transfer augmentation and thermo-hydraulic performance of a double-pass solar air heater at different air mass flow rates. The corrugated double-pass solar air heater prototype was constructed to evaluate its performance experimentally. The experimental results were compared to the results of a 3D-validated numerical model sharing the same dimensions and operating parameters using ANSYS Fluent 18.2. This model was also used to study the impact of changing the design key parameters of the sinusoidal corrugations of the absorber plate, such as the amplitude and the pitch of the corrugations, on the thermo-hydraulic performance of the SAH. Results revealed that the sinusoidal corrugations contribute to flow turbulence enhancement leading to an increase in air exit temperature, output power, and thermal efficiency and decreased top energy loss when compared to flat plate double-pass solar air heater. The sinusoidal corrugated double-pass solar air heater showed a 25.72% and 9.93% average improvement over the flat plate double-pass solar air heater in Nusselt number and thermal efficiency, respectively. It was also revealed that increasing the air mass flow rate from 0.027 kg/s to 0.029 kg/s showed an enhancement in daily useful energy, average Nusselt number and average efficiency by 23.88%, 9%, and 17.1% respectively. This rise in mass flow rate, decreased the average outlet air temperature and daily top loss by 6.86% and 13.81% respectively but it showed an increase in pressure DROP by 15.33% leading to a rise in the air blower power which accounts for 0.13% of the useful energy. The results also showed that increasing the amplitude to 30 mm improved the SAH’s efficiency by 51.78% when compared to that of flat plate SAH. Furthermore, decreasing the pitch to 75 mm has improved the efficiency by 55.82 % when also compared to that of flat plate SAH.