Analytical and Numerical Models of a New Hybrid System of Earth Air Tunnel integrated Solar Air Heater with Sensible Storage

A novel combination of an earth air tunnel (EAT) and a sensible thermal storage-aided solar air heater has been proposed when the sensible storage medium is taken to be rocks filled within the air flow passage. Both transient and steady state models are presented. The former describes exact thermal behaviour of the system for a two-month winter period for the city of Baghdad, Iraq. The latter describes average performance of the system. The implicit finite difference method and method of separation of variables have been used to solve the pertinent equations in the respective models. Acceptable level of accuracy was obtained between the steady-state numerical and analytical solutions as well as between the numerical and the published data. It is revealed that preheating by a sufficiently long EAT module improves the effective power as well as the output temperature from the rock bed solar air heater by about 35% and 9% respectively for the present set of parameters considered. It is also observed that for the present set of parameters considered, the temperature gradients in the direction normal to air flow in the solar air heater are insignificant and may be ignored. A parametric study is also presented that assesses the impact of system parameters on the quality as well as quantity of the energy extracted from the system. This work is hence the first to couple an EAT with a sensible thermal storage equipped solar air heater and may pave way for future studies.