Abstract
With escalating environmental concerns, solar energy is a feasible approach to support a sustainable environment, considering the pressing need to move away from fossil fuels. Optimizing solar collector’s efficiency improves energy capture and lowers carbon emissions. One innovative technique is to the surface of solar collectors. The heat transfer is greatly increased by adding such tiny indentations, encouraging turbulence in the incoming working fluid. The article reviews the effect of dimples on the efficiency of various collector applications, including flat plate collector, solar water heaters, solar air collectors, parabolic trough solar collectors, photovoltaic thermal systems, desalination, and many others. The review also highlights ideal dimple shape, design, spacing, and depth for optimizing performance by synthesizing many theoretical and experimental findings. The results showed that dimple surfaces greatly enhanced solar collector’s efficiency, making it a promising design for renewable energy systems. The review also covers different challenges along with future directions to further enhance the efficiency of solar collectors which provides useful insight to researchers.
Keywords
Dimples, heat transfer, solar collectors, thermal efficiency
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
7-1-2026
Volume
312
Publication Title
Solar Energy
Publisher
Elsevier
School
School of Engineering
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Jamil, F., Baig, T., Adil, A., & Farrukh, A. (2026). Dimpled surfaces for thermal performance enhancement in solar collectors. Solar Energy, 312, 114582. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2026.114582