Thermal efficiency enhancement of solar aircraft by utilizing unsteady hybrid nanofluid: A single-phase optimized entropy analysis

Abstract

The foremost energy source originating from the sun, which is solar energy is widely utilized in solar technologies such as photovoltaic cells installed in energy plates, street lights, and water pumping. Meanwhile, the combination between solar radiations and nanotechnology is utilized in solar aircraft (SA). Therefore, this article investigated the working function of parabolic trough solar collector (PTSC) to analyze the performance of SA wings. The SA performance is reported due to the heat transfer analysis in the working fluid flows in PTSC, where the selected fluid is tangent hyperbolic hybrid nanofluid (THHNF). The THHNF is this article contains the blend of two nanoparticles (NP), including Copper (Cu) and Silica (SiO2), in the EG-Ethylene glycol viscous fluid. The heat transfer in the working fluid flows in the wings is discussed by considering the influencing factors, namely as variable thermal conductivity, thermal radiations, and porous media. In addition, entropy generation is also conducted for THHNF. The early set of mathematical formulation has been handled using a finite difference method. The distributions of velocity, temperature fields, shear stress, coefficient of surface drag, and Nusselt number are are depicted and tabulated: These results are restricted to the effect of controlling parameters. The main finding from this article is: The aircraft wings experience an enhancement in the heat transmission due to an amplification of thermal radiative flow and variant thermal conductivity. In comparison with conventional nanofluid, hybrid nanofluid shows better performance in heat transmission. The thermal efficacy of SiO2/Cu-EG over Cu-EG recorded a minimal level of 0.2%, and reached maximum percentage at 3.9%.