Experimental study and ANN prediction on thermal enhancement in a channel fitted with transverse tapered baffles

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of transverse tapered baffles on the thermal performance of the solar air heater. The experiment was conducted with the expectation of a constant heat flux. In turbulent flow, air serves as the working fluid with a Reynolds number range of 6,000 to 24,000. Two novel baffle types were employed in the experiment: convergence (C–TB) and divergence transverse tapered baffles (D–TB). The research hypothesis is to improve the thermal performance enhancement by focusing on reducing the pressure loss caused by modifying the shape of the transverse baffles to be C–TB and D–TB. The experiment employed convergence and divergence transverse tapered baffles with a fixed baffle pitch length ( P ) of 60 mm and four different convergence and divergence edge baffle heights ( e C and e D ) of 0, 3, 6, and 9 mm. The obtained experimental result was compared with the traditional transverse baffles (TB) with a height of 12 mm ( e ) and the smooth surface channel. This study revealed that novel baffle could reduce the friction factor lower than traditional TB by about 12.93-62.07% and improved the thermal enhancement factor over traditional TB by about 1.49-26.6%. The optimum state of the ANN model exhibited exceptional prediction accuracy with an RMSE and R 2 of 0.006 and 0.998, respectively.