Application of Nanofluids in Solar Cooling System: Dynamic Simulation by Means Trnsys Software

The use of solar technologies has become a very common and advantageous practice in both the industrial and civil sectors. The heat transfer in fluids is very crucial for solar system applications, especially for heating or cooling operation. Convective heat transfer can be enhanced passively by enhancing the thermal conductivity of the working fluid, or putting another material in the system with high value of the thermal conductivity. An innovative method of enhancement of thermal conductivity of base fluids is to insert nanoparticles. In recent years, nanofluids and their possible applications have been extensively studied. In this study, simulation based on a performance analysis of a solar cooling system is carried out by means of TRNSYS. First the analysis determines the peak energy demand for a building located in Naples. Beside, for the same configuration of solar system both pure water and Al2O3/water based nanofluids are considered as working fluids. Different values of volume concentrations, equal to 3.0%, and 6.0%, are investigated. The configuration is fully modelled in TRNSYS and dynamic simulations are run for the entire year. Various performance factors such as useful energy gain from collector, solar fraction, primary energy savings and pumping consumption are evaluated