A detailed review on various V-shaped ribs roughened solar air heater

Solar air heater (SAH) is a popular and economical device which collects the solar energy and is employed for space heating, drying of agricultural products, food items, and leather, seasoning of timber, etc. Attachment of artificial roughness on the absorber surface is an appropriate method to augment the heat transfer from the heated surface to the air flowing through SAH duct. Use of artificial roughness has been an area of great interest for researchers as far as the cooling of turbine blades, and combustion chambers are concerned. This technique is effective in enhancing the heat transfer in a micro-channel heating/cooling system. Present paper holistically furnishes concise information about various kinds of V-shaped roughness geometries used in SAHs for improving its performance covering experimental, analytical, numerical and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approaches. In this paper, 124 research articles have been referred, which provide a detailed comprehensive and comparative study revealing the effect of various geometrical parameters and different V-shaped roughness patterns on the performance of SAH. This article also brings in the information about the correlation developed by researchers for heat transfer and friction factor. This comprehensive review will be quite useful for technical persons and researchers working in the area of SAH.