TY - JOUR
TI - AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE MASS FLOW RATES EFFECT ON FLAT-PLATE SOLAR WATER HEATER PERFORMANCE USING AL2O3/WATER NANOFLUID
AU - Prakasam Michael Joseph Stalin
AU - Vellingiri Arjunan Thottipalayam
AU - Nataraj Sadanandam
JN - Thermal Science
PY - 2017
VL - 21
IS - 12
SP - 379
EP - 388
PT - Article
AB - In the present work, flat plate solar water heating system has been designed and fabricated accommodating 2 m2 area of solar collector and 0.12 m2 surface area of the heat exchanger using Al2O3/water nanofluid as the working fluid in order to evaluate the performance efficiency in the forced circulation mode. The instan-taneous efficiency of solar collector is calculated by taking lower volume fraction of 0.01% with average particle size of 25 nm with and without Triton X-100 sur-factant and varying the flow rate from 1 L per minute to 3 L per minute, as per ASHRAE standard. The experimental results show that utilizing Al2O3/water nanofluid with mass flow rate at 2 L per minute increases the collector efficiency by 14.3% when compared to distilled water as the working medium.