Thermal Performance of Nanofluid Flow Inside Evacuated Tube Solar Collector

Abstract

Solar collectors are systems for absorbing the sun's radiant energy and converting it into heat. The working principle of solar collectors are relying on the solar radiation incident upon the transparent surface, and the collected radiation heat is stored within the operating fluid. However, the conventional operating fluid is less than satisfactory in term of promoting the thermal efficiency of solar collector. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to investigate the use of nanofluid as an operating fluid in a single end evacuated solar collector. The expectation is that the flow behavior of nanofluid can lead to the improvement of thermal efficiency of solar collector. The design of solar collector is carried out using Gambit software and the heat transfer characteristics are simulated by nanofluid flow with 1%, 3% and 5% volumes by ANSYS Fluent software. The results demonstrate good agreement with existing experimental results. The numerical analysis shows the improvement of collector performance compared to pure water fluid. The results show that by increasing the nanoparticles volume fraction the efficiency of the collector improves significantly.