Comparative Analysis Between Water and Nanofluids as Working Fluids in Photovoltaic Thermal Collectors

Photovoltaic thermal collectors (PV/T) are devices that produce both electrical and thermal energies simultaneously. Water acts as the working fluid that cools down the PV cells, thus improving their electrical efficiency, and at the same time hot water is produced due to the heat exchange process. As a consequence heat transfer augmentation is an important issue that affects the performance of such a hybrid system. The objective of the current study is to evaluate the effect of using a nanofluid on the performance of a photovoltaic thermal (PV/T) collector. The performance of the water cooled PV/T collector without nanofluid is first evaluated and then additional correlations are incorporated to include the nanofluid properties. Results showed that the use of nanofluid enhanced the rate of heat transfer which resulted in improvement in the performance of the PV/T collector. However, such improvement was not found to be significantly high to shift for nanofluids as working fluids in PV/T collectors.