NUMERICAL STUDY OF A SOLAR COLLECTOR WITH PARTITIONS

An optimization procedure integrating response surface methodology and genetic algorithm is proposed to design a solar collector with partitions. The heat transfer phenomena in a solar collector are numerically studied by investigating the influences of the dimensionless partition length (L), the dimensionless partition thickness (W), and the dimensionless partition pitch (A) in the collector. The results show that both the dimensionless partition length and the dimensionless partition pitch significantly affect the thermal performance while the dimensionless partition thickness only has a slight effect. The thermal enhancement from these optimized geometries (L, W, A) = (0.8, 0.1, 2) is 61% higher than those obtained in the literature.