Experimental and Numerical Study on Heat Transfer Enhancement of Home Radiators by Employing Solar Cells and Fans

Abstract

In the traditional heating systems, heated water in the boiler is circulated in the home radiators to warm up the ambient temperature as an air conditioning system. Generally, in the mentioned systems, the natural convection has a key role in the heat transfer from the radiator to the surroundings. The forced convection can be also applied by using air fans, and consequently the Nusselt number will be increased, which means an increase in the efficiency and heat transfer. In this work, the air fans were placed in a sample radiator to improve the thermal efficiency. The used fans are powered by batteries, and the battery supply is charged by solar cells. The fans will be able to operate at nights when the electric energy of the solar cells has been stored in the accumulator. The problem was simulated using the ANSYS Fluent software to compare the obtained numerical results to those recorded experimentally. In numerical and experimental results, an increase in heat transfer was observed. The obtained results showed that the average heat transfer rate was improved by about 21% by using forced convention.