EnginSoft - CAE Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft International Conference 2011
CAE Technologies for Industry

Optimized Solar Collectors for Nanofluids Applications

De Risi Arturo - Università del Salento (Italy)
Milanese Marco - Università del Salento (Italy)

Abstract

The Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC) is the most common type of high-temperature solar thermal technology, in which the working fluid is usually synthetic oil or molten salt. Experiences in existing plants have shown some operating problems with all these types of fluid.
An innovative solar PTC working with gas-based nanofluid is presented to avoid the disadvantages of using conventional working fluids. Nanofluids were found to have novel properties that make them useful in many applications in heat transfer.
A solar thermal analysis and then a computational algorithm have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the PTC. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm optimization (MOGA II) has been implemented on an optimization problem in order to improve the performance of the solar plant and to choose the optimal configuration.