Effect of using nanofluids on efficiency of parabolic trough collectors in solar thermal electric power plants

•Performance of solar parabolic trough collectors with nanofluid is evaluated.•Solar receiver with nanofluid has higher Nusselt number in comparison with base fluid.•Thermal efficiency of solar collector increases with increase of nanoparticle volume fraction.

In this paper, forced convection heat transfer nanofluid flow inside the receiver tube of solar parabolic trough collector is numerically simulated. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are carried out to study the influence of using nanofluid as heat transfer fluid on thermal efficiency of the solar system. The three-dimensional steady, turbulent flow and heat transfer governing equations are solved using Finite Volume Method (FVM) with the SIMPLEC algorithm. The results show that the numerical simulation are in good agreement with the experimental data. Also, the effect of various nanoparticle volume fraction on thermal and hydrodynamic characteristics of the solar parabolic collector is discussed in details. The results indicate that, using of nanofluid instead of base fluid as a working fluid leads to enhanced heat transfer performance. Furthermore, the results reveal that by increasing of the nanoparticle volume fraction, the average Nusselt number increases.