Effect of Nanofluids on Performance of a Flat Plate Solar Collector

The increasing world population has increased the demand for electricity and energy. This is putting pressure on the already depleting fossil fuel resources to keep up with the demand and that is why identifying alternative ways of producing energy, especially renewable energies, is critical moving forward into the future to produce the energy demand as well as tackle some of United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. This study aims to investigate the performance enhancement of various nanofluids on a flat plate solar collector via an experimental study using a flat plate solar collector test rig. Nanofluids, namely water-copper oxide, water-aluminium oxide, radiator coolant-copper oxide, and radiator coolant-aluminium oxide were prepared at a 0.1% nanoparticle volume concentration through magnetic stirring with the addition of 15% concentration of the Triton-X surfactant. All four nanofluids along with water and radiator coolant were investigated at 0.5 and 0.75 LMP flow rates. The data obtained were used for numerical calculation using MS Excel to calculate the thermal efficiency of the flat plate solar collector. The findings are that the water-aluminium oxide had the maximum energy efficiency at 54.7% and 53.7% at 0.5 and 0.75 LMP flow rates respectively. Overall, the higher flow rate returned a higher efficiency.