Characterization and performance enhancement studies on solar glycol as heat transfer fluid

Abstract

Over the past decades there is an urgent need for energy efficient thermal management system due to the ever-increasing demand for power with rising energy cost Heating and cooling processes play a major role in numerous industrial sectors such as power plants, chemical/petrochemical industries automobiles food nuclear solar thermal and microelectronics extra Hence there is a large scope in the present and future towards newlineaugmenting the heat transfer rate and energy efficiency of these thermal systems The improvement in energy efficiency in any heat exchangers do not offer benefits only with respect to energy and price; also it decreases the Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions and the corresponding global warming effect significantly The efficiency of a heat transfer system mainly depends on the geometry and material as well as the heat transfer characteristics of working fluids Heat Transfer Fluids (HTFs) play a critical role, depending on the thermophysical properties Presently the HTFs are selected based on a trial and error process which consumes considerable time and involves a high newlinecost This can be easily overcome by using the recent developments in multicriteria newlinedecision-making tool that provides an optimum solution even with the inclusion of environmental safety and economic attributes Two different multi criteria decision making tools namely TOPSIS and Grey Relational Analysis are adopted in the present study to find out the optimal heat transfer fluids for solar thermal applications newline newline