A Parametric Study of Conjugate Heat Transfer of Solar Chimney

Recently, new buildings are being designed considering natural sources such as natural ventilation as a passive technique. Solar chimneys are among those techniques of passive ventilation systems in buildings, to enhance the air quality and some times the thermal comfort. In this work, a numerical study of a solar chimney for forced ventilation is carried out. Also a parametric study varying the ambient air temperature, the solar irradiance and Reynolds number is considered. The dimensions of the solar chimney are 4.0 m high, and 0.35 m deep, the absorber surface of the solar chimney was 0.15 m thick of reinforced concrete. The conservation equations of mass, momentum, energy and two turbulence equations are solved under some simplifications such as: 2-D, incompressible, steady state turbulent air flow and conjugated heat transfer (conduction, forced convection and radiation). k-ω turbulent model was implemented and finite volume technique was applied to solve the conservation equations. In order to guarantee the right performance of the computer code, it was reduced to cases reported in the literature and verified; also, it was validated with an experiment. The variation of ambient temperature, solar irradiance and Reynolds number are analyzed in the parametric study. The heat transfer correlations for total Nusselt number (convective plus radiative) are introduced. From the results, it was found that the heat transfer increases as the Reynolds number increases for the hot surface of the solar chimney.