CFD MODELING OF SOLAR COLLECTOR WITH NANO-FLUID DIRECT ABSORPTION FOR CIVIL APPLICATION

Direct solar absorption has been considered often in the past as a possible configuration of solar thermal collectors for residential and small commercial applications. Of course, a direct absorption could improve the performance of solar collectors by skipping one step of the heat transfer mechanism of standard devices and by modifying the temperature distribution inside the collector. In fact, classical solar thermal collectors have a metal sheet as absorber, designed such that water has the minimum temperature in each transversal section, in order to collect as much as possible the solar thermal energy. On the other hand, in a direct configuration, the hottest part of the system is the operating fluid and this allows to have a more efficient conversion. Nanofluids, i.e. fluids with a suspension of nano-particles, as carbon nano-horns, could be a good and innovative family of absorbing fluids, for their higher absorption coefficient with respect to the base fluid and stability under moderate temperature gradients. Moreover, carbon nanohorns offer the significant advantage to be non-toxic unlike other carbon nanoparticles (e.g. carbon nanotubes). In this work, an original 3D model of the absorption phenomena in nano-fluids flowing in a cylindrical tube is coupled with a CFD analysis of the flow and temperature field. Recent measurements of the optical properties of nano-fluids with different concentrations have been used for the radiation heat transfer modeling and included in the fluid dynamic modeling as well. Heat losses due to conduction, convection and radiation at the boundaries are included in the model. The results are compared with the typical performance of flat solar collectors present on the market.