Numerical Study of Natural Convection Heat Transfer in a Horizontal Wavy Absorber Solar Collector Based on the Second Law Analysis

Literature about entropy generation analysis of a wavy enclosure is surprisingly scarce. In this paper, a FORTRAN code using an explicit finite-volume method is provided for estimating the entropy production due to the natural convection heat transfer in a cosine wavy absorber solar collector. The volumetric entropy generation terms -both the heat transfer term and the friction term, were straightly calculated. The solution was conducted assuming the isothermal boundary conditions of the absorber and the cover of solar collector. The results were obtained for Rayleigh numbers from 10 to 105. The simulation results were compared with a flat plate absorber. It was found that, with increasing the cosine wave amplitude, the collector enclosure irreversibility decreases.