Thermal performance and entropy generation analysis of a high concentration ratio parabolic trough solar collector with Cu-Therminol®VP-1 nanofluid

摘要

This paper presents results of a numerical study on the thermal and thermodynamic performance of ahigh concentration ratio parabolic trough solar collector using Cu-Therminol VP-1 nanofluid as the heattransfer fluid. A parabolic trough system with a concentration ratio of 113 and a rim angle of 80 has beenused in this study. The thermal physical properties of both the base fluid and the copper nanoparticleshave been considered temperature dependent. Inlet temperatures in the range 350–650 K and flow ratesin the range 1.22–135 m3 h 1 have been used. The numerical analysis consisted of combined Monte-Carloray tracing and computational fluid dynamics procedures. The Monte-Carlo ray tracing procedure is usedto obtain the actual heat flux profile on the receiver’s absorber tube, which is later coupled to a finitevolume based computational fluid dynamics tool to evaluate the thermal and thermodynamic performanceof the receiver. Results show that the thermal performance of the receiver improves as thenanoparticle volume fraction increases. The thermal efficiency of the system increases by about 12.5%as the nanoparticle volume fraction in the base fluid increase from 0% to 6%. The entropy generation ratesin the receiver reduce as the nanoparticle volume fraction increases for some range of Reynolds numbers.Above a certain Reynolds number, further increase in the Reynolds numbers makes the entropy generationhigher than that of a receiver with only the base fluid.