Thermal Performance of Wickless Heat Pipe Flat Plate Solar Collector with Nanofluid

K. B. Waghulde; R. N. Todkar; N. A. Bandal; H. Ranpise

Abstract

Water heating by solar energy is the most important solar energy utilization because of technological feasibility and economic attraction compared with other kind’s energy utilization. The system can supply hot water at 50oC to 80oC which can be used for both domestic and industrial purposes. Nanofluids are the important fluids containing a very small amount of Nano particles that are uniformly suspended in fluids. Nanofluids having high thermal conductivity as compared to other conventional fluids. In this paper we have putted the thermal performance of two different wickless heat pipe solar collectors were investigated by using pure water, CuO-BN/water nanofluid for different coolant mass flow rates and tilt angles. The first collector uses only pure water, the second one utilizes CuO and BN nanoparticles with water as a base fluid. Experiments were carried out for the two different collectors under the same experimental conditions. The wickless heat pipe flat plate solar collector containing nanofluid showed better performance. The optimum performance for both the collector was obtained at 31.5° tilt angle. Keywords: Flat plate solar collector, heat pipe, heat transfer, nanofluid