Numerical Investigation of Nanofluid-based Solar Collectors

Solar thermal collectors are applicable in the water heating or space conditioning systems. Due to the low efficiency of the conventional collectors, some suggestions have been presented for improvement in the collector efficiency. Adding nanoparticles to the working fluid in direct absorption solar collector, which has been recently proposed, leads to improvement in the working fluid thermal and optical properties such as thermal conductivity and absorption coefficient. This results certainly in collector efficiency enhancement. In this paper, the radiative transfer and energy equations are numerically solved. Due to laminar and fully developed flow in the collector, the velocity profile is assumed to be parabolic. As can be observed from the results, outlet temperature of collector is lower than that obtained using uniform velocity profile. Furthermore, a suspension of carbon nanohorns in the water is used as the working fluid in the model and its effect on the collector efficiency is investigated. It was found that the presence of carbon nanohorns increases the collector efficiency by about 17% compared to a conventional flat-plate collector. In comparison with the mixture of water and aluminium nanoparticles, a quite similar efficiency is obtained using very lower concentration of carbon nanohorns in the water.