Heat transfer by nanofluids through a flat plate solar collector

Forced convective flow and heat transfer by different nanofluids through a flat plate solar collector is analyzed numerically by this article. The solar collector has the flat-plate cover and sinusoidal wavy absorber. Four different nanofluids like water-Ag nanofluid, water based Cu nanofluid, water-Al2O3 nanofluid and water-CuO nanofluid are used as the operational fluids inside the solar collector. The governing partial differential equations with proper boundary conditions are solved by Finite Element Method using Galerkin's weighted residual scheme. The behavior of different nanofluids related to performance such as temperature and velocity distributions, radiative and convective heat transfers, mean temperature and velocity of the nanofluid is investigated systematically. This performance includes the solid volume fraction namely phi with respect to above mentioned nanofluids. The results show that the better performance of heat transfer inside the collector is found by using the highest phi of water based Ag nanofluid. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.