Performance Assessment of Flat Plate Solar Collector Using Different Nanofluids

Abstract

In this work, a numerical study has been performed to investigate the performance of a Flat plate solar collector FPSC using five different nanofluids including Al2 O3 , CeO2 , Cu, SiO2 , and TiO2 as the working fluid with a volume fraction VF range of 0-2% and mass flow rate of 0.02kg/s. A computer program written in MATLAB is developed and the equations are solved in an iterative approach to obtain the output temperature. The model is validated through a comparison with an experimental data that is taken from the literature and a good agreement is obtained. A parametric study is done to investigate the effects of VF’s on the performance of the collector. The analyses have been conducted for the city of Aydın in Turkey. The results show that for VF of 2%, the maximum efficiency augmentation is observed in SiO2 nanofluid by 10%.

Keywords

• flat plate solar collector
• nusselt number
• thermal performance
• nanofluid
• entropy