Optimization of solar air heater using differential evolution

A solar energy application with maximum efficiency is the need of the day to meet out the power demands. Thermal Performance of a flat plate solar air heater is less and several approaches such as Genetic Algorithm, etc., have been attempted to solve this problem. The purpose of this work is to find the advantages of the application of Differential Evolution (DE) for the optimization of a flat plate solar air heater. The thermal efficiency of flat plate solar air heater is tested by optimizing its construction and operating variables such as Reynolds number, tilt angle of the plate, emissivity of the plate and velocity of air etc., The impact of these parameters variation on thermal performance is analyzed. In this work, the climatic data for the city of Hamirpur is considered, which is taken from an already published work in which authors applied Genetic Algorithm (GA). The reported results of GA are also considered for comparison with PSO and DE. Simulation results are quite promising and show that DE performs better than PSO and GA.