Thakur, D.S.Khan, M.K.Pathak, M.2017-08-282017-08-282016http://hdl.handle.net/2263/61922papers presented to the 12th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Costa de Sol, Spain on 11-13 July 2016.In the present work, A 2D CFD simulation using ANSYS FLUENT 15.0 have been performed to investigate the performance of flat plate solar air heaters with different rib geometries (artificial roughness) such as semi-circular, circular, rectangular and triangular (wedge) and hyperbolic rib with flat tip. In fact, the hyperbolic rib profile is the novelty in this work. The CFD model of smooth duct is validated with the Dittus- Boelter Nusselt number correlation and the Blasius equation for heat transfer and frictional pressure drop respectively. RNG kɛ model is used for turbulent modelling. The proposed hyperbolic rib profile gives best performance at low Re whereas rectangular profile is found to be best at high Re.6 pagesPDFenUniversity of PretoriaSolar air heaterRib geometriesParametric studyPresentation