Solar Collector Application using Nanofluid in Thermosyphon

Abstract

The development of solar collectors for application in water heating, agricultural product drying, heat engines have attracted attention of scientist. Energy usage is inevitable, as renewable energy is becoming more popular and environmentally accepted. In this study, the concept of flow inside the collector tube is mainly by natural convection as a heat transport in the domain. The objectives of this study are to investigate the heat transfer enhancement of titanium water nanofluid (TiO2-water nanofluid) and the effect of inclination angle of a single tube evacuated solar collector in a closed thermosyphon. TiO2-nanoparticles was dispersed into the based fluid (water) using volume fraction concentrations of 0.05-1%. For the geometrical tilt angle, three different inclination angles of 30o, 45o and 60o for a constant heat flux of 500W/m2 corresponding to relative solar irradiance absorb by a single tube collector. Moreover, due to inevitable coupling of the flow with temperature and low velocity profile related with the flow, the velocity and pressure coupling was computed using PISO scheme. The present result demonstrated that addition of TiO2nanoparticles produced a reasonable Heat transfer enhancement in comparison with conventional heat transfer fluid (water). Heat transfer enhancement increases with increasing volume fraction of TiO2-nanoparticles. Nusselt number enhancement was common at inclination angle of 30 o. Therefore, enhancement of 25.6% was observed at a volume fraction of 0.1% and it was noting that increases the volume fraction will result in a more than 100% enhancement to water. The influence of inclination angle has indicated that the maximum Nusselt number and velocity are present at angle of 30o. Hence, inclination angle is an effective parameter for nanofluid filled in single tube evacuated solar collector.