Study of solar chimney with openfoam

Abstract

The aim of this work is to study the thermodynamic phenomena and performance of solar chimneys using Open-FOAM. OpenFOAM is an open-source computational fluid dynamics software used by a wide international community.Although several different models for simulating the flow and heat transfer in fluids, heat transfer in solid media and also radiation heat exchange are available, not all the combinations of the individual models are already available, in the down loadable distribution, to be used in the same problem. In this work, mass, momentum, energy and radiation exchange between surfaces equations in OpenFOAM are combined for developing solar chimney simulations. A case of a solar dryer is used to test the performance of the obtained model and the results obtained are compared against numerical and experimental data obtained from the literature