Performance Enhancement and Improvement of Energy Efficiency in Evacuated Tube Heat Pipe Collector with Nanocomposite: A Review

Abstract

Solar collector tube is used to combine incident energy and convert it into heat energy. Recently several studies have been done on improving the performance of the solar collector. Solar energy is clean energy and does not create pollution. The sun gives more power than we need. Solar collector consists of an absorber unit which transfers the heat energy of the sun to a working fluid. It is easily seen that solar intensity has more effect on the evacuated tube solar collector. In solar applications like distillation of salty water, heating, drying, air conditioning, and air heating, evacuated tube collector gives higher efficiency than flat plate collector. The evacuated tube solar collector technology gives good performance in bad weather conditions than the conventional system because vacuum inside the glass tube allows it to store higher percentage of heat. The challenge in the production of future generation evacuated tube collector technology is the control and management of operating temperature and heat generation. Heat pipe of solar collector controls operating temperature and prevent overheating that common problem in solar heating application. After chemical treatment, the heat pipe will control the freezing and prevent the evacuated tube. Heat transfer equipment is used to transfer the heat from one fluid to another fluid in many industries. The performance of solar collector with heat pipe depends on various factors such as solar radiation, ambient temperature, and flow conditions. With increasing mass flow rate, the heat transfer coefficient of the nanofluids increases. The use of nanofluids with evacuated tube heat pipe solar collector gives more efficiency and increase the output.