Effect of Nanoparticles Deposition on Cooling Performance of Photovoltaic Panels

The current research aims to investigate the deposition and dispersion of nanoparticles for thermally developing laminar flow inside a cooling channel of a photovoltaic (PV) panel. The particle transport is modeled in an Eulerian–Lagrangian framework using a two-way coupling approach to perform the particle trajectories. In the absence of turbulent fluctuations, Brownian diffusion is the main force that contributes to particle deposition due to the small size of the particles used in the current study (below 100 nm). Several parameters were investigated such as inlet temperature, Reynolds number, nanoparticle size, and concentration in order to record the subsequent effects on the deposition efficiency, heat transfer coefficient, and pressure drop. There is no direct particle deposition model available in commercial computational packages such as fluent, so a deposition model was developed and programed in c-language using the user-defined function (UDF) capabilities available in the fluent solver to model how the particles are affected by wall impacts. Model validation was performed against the experimental studies found in the literature and showed good agreement. The efficiency of particle deposition on the channel wall was found to increase with decreasing nanoparticle size and/or Reynolds number. Furthermore, the deposition efficiency increased with the increase in fluid inlet temperature and nanofluid concentration. Moreover, the heat transfer rate was decreased as a result of decreasing nanofluid concentration caused by nanoparticle deposition on the channel walls, while the pumping power was also decreased due to concentration loss.