Performance evaluation of solar air heater equipped with louvered fins

The current work deals with the thermal performance of louvered finned solar air collector. The study involves evaluating various parameters such as temperature rise, thermal efficiency, effective efficiency and insolation compared to that of plane solar air heater. It is observed that at minimum duct height and minimum fin spacing the thermal efficiency shows a noticeable enhancement but the effective efficiency reduced at higher mass flow rate, even may be less than plane solar air heater. This is because of higher pressure drop that occurs at higher mass flow rate. Further the result revealed that the increasing solar intensity leads to increase in temperature rise linearly while the solar intensity has a little effect on thermal efficiency for a given mass flow rate.