Pressure Drop, Flow Distribution, and Turbulence in Collector Hydraulics
Abstract
A thorough assessment of the hydraulics of a solar thermal collector can lead to a significant amelioration of its performance. Of main interest in this context is the turbulence and hence the improved heat absorption of the collector fluid. But also the distribution of this fluid over the parallel riser pipes of the collector should be as uniform as possible (Weitbrecht et al., 2002). There are several means for the investigation of fluid flow and heat transfer in solar thermal collectors, which sometimes also depend on the collector under consideration. In this paper we focus on CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations in comparison to experimental results and also phenomenological 1D calculations for a particular concentrating collector (see section 3).