Investigations on Solar Air Collector Performance Improvement by Adoption of Response Surface Method Strategy

Abstract

In the present, world has energy identified as a vital component of our daily life for several reasons ranging from cooking energy needs to space conditioning requirements. The over-crowding of urban communities has put a huge pressure on the energy generation sector to produce more and more electric power, thereby leading to climatic degradation. The human societal development clearly marks out Industrial Revolutions occurring at periodic intervals. These events have lead to rewire the process of generation and utilization of power to meet the ever increasing energy demand. The utilization of nature-based energy sources through clean energy conversion technologies has been identified as a unique solution to mitigate climate change issues. The solar energy offers an attractive means to meet differing patterns of energy needs of human society that ranges from low grade thermal energy to high grade electric power. The promotion of clean energy has been the foremost priority of the global community of nations, under the platform of United Nations Sustainable Development goals. Hence, this work gains significance toward making a more reliable thermal energy conversion device to tap the huge potential of solar energy that has a worldwide geographical presence. The performance of solar thermal collectors depends on desired output along with climatic factors and operating parameters of working fluid like flow rate and inlet temperature. In this perspective, the overall performance regulation of solar thermal collector transforms into a multi-variable optimization problem. The technique of design of experiment (DoE) is a statistical approach of optimization that effectively handles situations encountering multi-variable selection to optimize a defined objective function. This study aims to evolve optimal operating scenarios for a solar flat absorber surface collector used for drying of agricultural produce. The experimental data collected for the solar flat absorber surface collector is utilized to improvise its operation for any general operating situation with parameters subjected to random variations. This investigation has yielded dataset on development of inputs to make an intelligent crop drying strategy based on local climatic factors.