Insulator roof, acentric absorber tube and nanofluid effect on parabolic trough collector efficiency via two-phase flow simulation

Abstract

Current study aims to present an effectual Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC), which is employed from nanofluid up to 4% as working fluid numerically using the finite volume scheme. Another propose is comparing the responses using the Single-Phase Mixture (SPM) method and Two-Phase Mixture (TPM) method. In this study, the effects of employing acentric absorber tube up to 20mm and an insulator roof from 30° to 150°are investigated. Subsequently, the best arrangement is established. Also, various nanofluid constraints (nanoparticles diameter and volume fraction) for the best arrangement is examined by TPM method. For proposed and conventional PTC configurations, the average Nusselt number by TPM method is higher than by SPM method. Furthermore, it is shown that employing proposed PTC provide higher energy efficiency, Nusselt number, outlet temperature, and performance evaluation criteria (PEC) in studied range of Reynolds numbers from 3000 to 11500. Finally, the proposed PTC provide the energy efficiency equal to 73.10% having the acentric value of 20mm and arc-angle of 70° occupying by nanofluid considering nanoparticles diameter of 20nm and nanoparticles volume fraction of 1%.