Nanofluid natural convection in a corrugated solar power plant using the hybrid LBM-TVD method

Abstract In the present study, the Buongiorno's two-phase method was implemented to investigate the nanofluid heat transfer in a triangle solar collector with corrugated bottom wall. A novel hybrid Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) with using Total Variation Diminishing (TVD) method was developed. The effects of important physical parameters such as Rayleigh number, volume fraction of nanoparticle and different types of corrugated walls on the fluid flow pattern, nanoparticles distribution and temperature fields are studied in details. Three cases were considered for the numerical simulation. It was found that the Case 2 has the largest heat transfer rate. Based on the obtained results, the center region (inside the enclosure) has nearly uniform particle distribution. However, the region near cold and hot wall have higher and lower nanoparticle concentration, respectively. With increasing nanofluid concentration (ϕ) while it is smaller than a critical value, the heat transfer enhancement's ratio increases. In addition, when solid volume fraction of nanofluid is larger than the critical value, the heat transfer efficiency will be decreased by increasing the ϕ.