Assessment of a heat pipe solar collector with nanofluids

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Assessment of a heat pipe solar collector with nanofluids Mohammad Shafiey Dehaj 1

&

Mehdi Ahmadi 2 & Mostafa Zamani Mohiabadi 3

Received: 13 May 2020 / Accepted: 9 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract This research was designed to experimentally study the influence of using three metal oxide nanofluids at different high flow rates with various mass concentration of nanoparticles as the working fluid, on the thermal efficiency and pumping power of heat pipe solar collector (HPSC). The volume flow rate of the working fluid was 5, 8, 11, and 14 L/min. Also, mass concentration of nanoparticles was 0.5 and 1.167 g/L. Co-precipitation technique was employed to prepare CuO, Al2O3, and MgO nanoparticles. The optical and structural characterization of the nanostructure were considered by using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and UV-visible analysis. The thermal performance of the HPSC using metal oxide nanofluids and water was compared with the volume flow rate that varied from 5 to 14 L/min. It was observed that nanofluids improved the collector efficiency between 9 and 20% compared with deionized water. The present results revealed that the maximum efficiency was found to be 83% for a mass concentration of 1.167 g/L of CuO nanofluids and volume flow rate of 14 L/min. The HPSC efficiency shows better improvement with the increasing mass concentration of metal oxide nanoparticles and volume flow rate. Also, the increase rate of the pumping power and pressure drop is less than 0.9% for all of the nanofluids that were used as the working fluids. Results showed that the metal oxide nanofluids are appropriate for increasing the efficiency of HPSC. Keywords Nanoparticles . Metal oxide nanofluids . Heat pipe solar collector . Efficiency . Pumping power . Experimental

Introduction Solar energy can be restrained by solar systems like heat pipe solar collector (HPSC). Using solar energy for heating, cooling, and supplying indoor hot water in buildings has been receiving great attention due to public awareness of the deficiency of conventional fuels (Azad 2012). Solar energy has attracted great attention because of features such as abundance, wide distribution, and being pollution free. The abovementioned characteristics have made solar energy a highly sought-after type of energy in many fields. A solar Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Mohammad Shafiey Dehaj [email protected] 1

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran

2

Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran

3

Department of Chemical Engineering, Research Department of High Temperature Fuel Cell, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran

collector market has had its prime time lately in many countries all over the world (Krawczyk et al. 2020). As solar collector is the main section of any solar sys