Performance of cylindrical plastic solar collectors for air heating

• The study including the combined convective and radiative heat transfer analysis.
• The solar collector is manufactured from LDPE films acting as a black absorber.
• Comparisons between the experimental data and the theoretical methods have been made.
• The thermal efficiency increases with decreasing the major axes of elliptic shape.
• The Nusselt number between the absorber and the heated air is determined.

A theoretical and experimental study including the combined convective and radiative heat transfer analysis of a flexible cylindrical type solar air-heater for agriculture crops dehydration as well as heating processes is presented. The solar collector is manufactured from LDPE films acting as a black absorber with a back insulation and double transparent covers sealed together along its edges. The collector is to be blown with a flow of pressurized air. The experiments are carried out with solar collectors of circular shapes having 0.5 m diameter and solar collectors of elliptic shapes having 0.55 m and 0.65 m major axis. Energy balance of the cover, absorber and air yield three simultaneous quadratic algebraic equations in the three unknowns namely, cover, absorber and outlet air temperatures. A computer program is written for calculating the outlet temperature using the Newton–Raphson method and the collector thermal efficiency in terms of its diameter, length, mass flow rate, inlet temperature and solar insolation. Moreover the Nusselt number between the absorber and the heated air is determined experimentally in relation with the Reynolds number. Comparisons between the experimental data and the theoretical methods for the collector efficiency demonstrate a good agreement. In addition of this, the present experimental results of Nusselt number are correlated and compared with a correlation of another authors.