Experimental Investigation of Nano Particles Blended with Water on Solar Flat Plate Collector

Abstract

Heating of water for domestic purpose by making use of solar energy is essential and it is one of the effective ways of utilizing solar energy. Initial cost of solar water heating (SWH) system is high, but the operation cost is zero. This paper discusses on improving the performance of a flat plate solar energy collector by changing the design parameters of the number of riser tubes and the arrangement of riser tubes in zig-zag pattern from the existing flat plate collector system (FPC) and using the different working nanoparticles with base fluids like aluminium oxide mixed with water. Experiments were conducted using copper tube in headers and risers with two different configurations and maintain the same dimensions. The performance comparison was made for all the two types of collectors in closed loop. The performance shows that the efficiency of FPC with zig-zag arrangement of tubes (Z-Configuration) is higher than that of conventional FPC. Thus the newly presented FPCs system produces higher efficiency than the existing conventional flat plate collector system.