CFD Simulations for Solar Collectors Including Condensation and Ice Accretion
Abstract
Nucleation processes such as condensation or icing are of considerable importance in the field of collector physics, because water droplets inside a collector can cause attenuated solar yield and severe deteriorations of absorber coatings. Since nucleation is an extremely local phenomenon, general physical considerations will not suffice to predict whether condensation occurs under certain, given conditions. Therefore a detailed spatial simulation is necessary to be able to cope with this issue, i.e., a simulation based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This contribution describes how to incorporate the physics of classical nucleation theory (CNT), which is also briefly explained, into the open source code OpenFOAM to combine CNT with CFD. Furthermore, the results of a simple test case are included for demonstration.