Experimental Study for Estimation of Air Heating Performance and Improvement of Thermal Performance of Hybrid Solar Air-water Heater

Solar energy is one of the important renewable energy resources. It can be used for air heating, hot water supply, heat source of desiccant cooling system and so on. And many researches for enhancing efficiency have been conducted because of these various uses of solar thermal energy. This study was performed to investigate the air heating performance of hybrid solar air-water heater that can heat air and liquid respectively or simultaneously and finding method for improving thermal performance of this collector. This collector has both liquid pipe and air channel different with the traditional solar water and air heater. Fins were installed in the air channel for enhancing the air heating performance of collector. Also air inlet & outlet temperature, ambient temperature and solar collector’s inner part temperature were confirmed with different air velocity on similar solar irradiance. As a result, temperature of heated air was shown about 43°C to 60°C on the 30°C of ambient temperature and thermal efficiency of solar collector was shown 28% to 73% with respect to air velocity. Also, possibility of improvement of thermal performance of this collector could be ascertained from the heat transfer coefficient calculated from this experiment. Thus, it is considered that the research for finding optimal structure of hybrid solar air-water heater for enhancing thermal performance might be needed to conduct as further study based on the method for improving air heating performance confirmed in this study.