many research studies have been performed on forced convection (active) solar dryers for fruit and vegetables. a short survey of these showed that applying the forced convection solar dryer not only significantly reduced the drying time but also resulted in many improvements in the quality of the dried products. active indirect and mixed-mode thin layer solar drying experiments were conducted o...

Solar energy is used for solar water heater in domestic and industrial purpose. Pulsating heat pipe is a fast responding, flexible and high performance thermal conducting device. The CLPHP system described in this study relies on the natural forces of gravity and capillary action and does not require an external power source. The flat plate collector consisted of a 2 mm thick sheet of Aluminum ...

A straightforward framework for identifying key design parameters and determining their values for a site-built integrated collector storage solar water heater (ICSSWH) under uncertainty is developed. The framework is then used to evaluate the design for a ICSSWH, which uses locally available materials and can be assembled by builders without specialized training in solar system construction. I...

Packed bed is generally recommended for attaching with solar air heater in order to store thermal energy of hot air. For designing such a system under the given system and operating parameters, it is required to predict performance of the system by using mathematical models. In the present paper an attempt has been made to discuss mathematical models reported in the literature for predicting th...

Solar energy is a good option among renewable energy resources due to its easy availability and abundance. The simplest and most efficient way to utilize solar energy is to convert it into thermal energy and this can be done with the help of solar collectors. The thermal performance of such collectors is poor due to less heat transfer from the collector surface to air. In this work, experimenta...

An experimental desalination system coupling a vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) unit and a vacuum tube solar heat collection (SHC) unit was developed and tested. The parametric sensitivity of the VMD unit performance was investigated first using an electric heater as the heat source, and then the whole system was examined using solar heat. It was revealed that hot feed temperatures higher tha...

Solar thermal water heating systems reduce household energy bills by using the free solar radiation provided by the sun to heat water for residential needs. In order to eliminate the need for electricity to run a pump to drive the fluid circulation in these systems, fluid buoyancy effects can be employed to move the fluid from lower elevations to higher elevations. There are several operational...

This paper reports the development of a computer approach for evaluating the general performance of stand-alone wind/photovoltaic generating systems. Simple models for different system components are developed, integrated, and used to predict the behavior of generating systems based on available wind/solar and load data. The model is useful for evaluating the performance of stand-alone generati...

This paper presents the study of fluid flow and heat transfer in a plain rectangular duct of a solar air heater by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The effect of Reynolds number on heat transfer coefficient and friction factor was investigated. A commercial finite volume package ANSYS FLUENT 12.1 is used to analyze and visualize the nature of the flow across the duct of a solar air hea...