Estimation of Natural Convection Heat Transfer Inside Vertical Cylindrical Solar Storage Tanks
Abstract
Natural convection heat transfer inside a solar storage tank significantly contributes to the rate of heat loss from the tank. However, only a limited number of studies in the literature investigated the means to predict convection heat transfer coefficient inside the tank. This study presents a numerical investigation of natural convection heat transfer inside vertical cylindrical storage tanks and the simulated results were then used as a benchmark to assess the suitability of using existing flat plate correlations to predict the rate of heat loss from such tanks. The results showed that using flat plate correlations lead to deviations in rate of heat loss with up to 23% compared to numerical results. These findings demonstrate that there is still a need to develop a correlation that can accurately predict convective heat transfer coefficient inside cylindrical storage tanks.