Effects of heat source location on the performance of the solar chimney with a horizontal absorber surface

Solar chimney has been studied extensively in many aspects, especially green design and building physics. Various designs of solar chimney have been proposed for improving its performance for a specific application, i.e ventilation and/or heating/cooling. In this work, we studied performance of a solar chimney including horizontal and vertical air channels connected continuously by a numerical model based on the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method. Two different total lengths and a fixed gap of the chimney were examined with two different heated walls. The considered parameters contained the flow rate, temperature rise, and thermal efficiency. The results show that heating upper wall or lower wall has a minor effect on the examined parameters. The findings can help to choose appropriate materials for upper wall to adapt to environmental conditions. Keywords: Solar chimney, natural ventilation, cooling, green design, CFD, flow rate.