PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF PARABOLIC TROUGH COLLECTOR USING NANOFLUID

Abstract

Energy demand increasing day by day in the world due to rapid increase in developments, which results in conventional resources are continuously depleting from many decades. Renewable energy is the green energy source, which help us to minimize the use of conventional source of fuel like fossil fuel. Solar energy is the better way to meet the need of world’s energy demand and India have large amount of solar energy or solar flux. To extract the energy from sun in the form of electricity we can use existing technology like solar photovoltaic and solar thermal system like concentrated solar power systems. Solar thermal is the best way to generate the electricity on the large basis and use the solar collector to extract the solar energy. Use of conventional fluids in the solar collector as a heat transfer medium suffer from some natural problems like poor heat gain or heat carrying property, Which results in decrease down the performance of solar collector. It has been seen that use of nano particles in conventional fluid can help to increase the thermal properties of the fluids, which in turn increase the performance of collector. Parabolic trough collector system is the way to generate the electricity on both small and large basis. This type of collector uses the mirror strips to reflect the rays of sun from collector and concentrate radiation on receiver tube, which is located on the focus point of the parabolic collector. In this project an experimental study has to be carried out to find the performance of solar parabolic trough collector. There are many types of method physically available today to enhance the performance of the PTC System like heat transfer analysis, double parabolic trough solar concentrator, parabolic trough receiver with outer vacuum shell, solar parabolic concentrator with multiple curved surfaces. But in this project the main concentration to evaluate the Performance of collector through nanofluids instead of conventional fluid. It has been seen that the performance evaluation with the use of nano fluid in parabolic trough technology is quite costly. But nanofluids show better thermo physical properties as compare to other conventional fluid so it is possible to increase the performance through nano particles in base fluid. Generally the efficiency of the solar parabolic collector is affected by the volume concentration of nano particles and due to mass flow rate of nano fluid. This project is based upon the use of water and MWCNT based nano fluids at different concentration i.e. 0.01% and 0.02% and also at different volume flow rates i.e. 160L/h and 100L/h in solar parabolic trough collector for evaluation and compares the performance of collector system.