Numerical Study of Sensible Thermal Storage in Solar Collectors for Air Heating Applications

This paper aims to study and analyze the impact of integrating a sensible thermal storage material into a solar air collector. A transient, two-dimensional model with user-defined functions is used to study the heat transfer by conduction, convection and radiation between thermal storage material and flowing air during charging and discharging cycles. The conservative equations are discretized using CFD code based on Finite volume method (FVM). A comparative study of different thermal storage materials is achieved to found out the best sensible materials required for a specified solar collector design (downward). The two cycles (charging and discharging), were investigated for various thermal storage materials of different height and subjected to different values of solar radiation. Temperatures contours were plotted and the amount of energy stored was calculated for each case to determine the most suitable solar heat storage material.