Theoretical investigation for optimal thermal and thermodynamic performance of flat-plate solar collector with nanofluids
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24425/ather.2025.154189Abstract
In this work, an analytical study is carried out on the performance of copper-based nanoparticles and water in flat-plate solar collectors. The effect of copper-based nanoparticles on various thermophysical properties of collectors has been studied and compared with water under the same conditions. The effects of temperature rise parameter from 0.0018 to 0.025, volume percentage of nanoparticles from 0 to 1 and mass flow rate in the range of 0.012 to 0.170 kg/s have been considered. The mass flow rate range covers both laminar and turbulent flow conditions. A detailed parametric study was carried out by developing appropriate MATLAB codes for various performance and energy equations to investigate the effects of volume percentage of nanoparticles and mass flow rate on the basic thermophysical properties and performance parameters, including Nusselt number, heat transfer coefficient, collector plate factor, heat removal factor, Reynolds number, collector heat gain, fluid outlet temperature and thermal efficiency. A new number has been introduced to find out the optimal value of mass flow rate for optimizing collector performance. From the analysis it was found that water collector achieved the maximum thermal efficiency of 53.7% for the highest value of mass flow rate of 0.1675 kg/s. For the nanofluid collector, the maximum efficiency is 70.5% for a nanofluid volume fraction of 0.48 and for the highest considered value of mass flow rate of 0.1675 kg/s. The nanofluid collector is predicted to provide up to 16.8% higher energy efficiency than the water collector.References
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