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Direct-expansion solar-assisted heat pumps (DX-SAHP) have been used widely to heat the consuming water of buildings and industrial facilities, domestic and industrial space heating and also, air conditioning. These systems transfer energy from lower temperature source to a higher temperature source. In DX-SAHP systems, In order to optimize the heat transfer of solar radiation to the refrigerant, the flat plate solar collector is used as the evaporator. In this paper, the thermal performance of a DX-SAHP has been studied using numerical simulation for heating the water of a house in Kermanshah. The system mainly employs a bare flat-plate solar collector with a surface area of 4 m2, a hot water tank with the volume of 150 L, a rotary-type hermetic compressor, a thermostatic expansion valve and R-134a is also used as working fluid in the system. The results show that the hours of system operation, during different months in the climate of Kermanshah, vary between 37 to 130 hours and the monthly average COP and the solar collector efficiency vary between 3.96 to 6.71 and 68 to 99 percent respectively. The effect of various parameters, including solar radiation, ambient temperature, collector area, compressor speed, number of collector cover and wind speed have been analyzed on the thermal performance of the system.

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In this paper, ferrofluid flow in a closed cooling loop without any mechanical pump has been simulated. The flow of the ferrofluid in the closed loop is resulted from applying a non-uniform magnetic field and the thermo-magnetic effect of the ferrofluids. The ferrofluid consist water and different volume fractions of iron oxide nanoparticles with nanoparticle diameter of 13nm. The two phase mixture model and the control volume technique have been used in the present study. The applied non-uniform magnetic field is resulted from an electromagnetic solenoid and the steady and also the transient modeling of the flow in the cooling loop from start point (stagnant ferrofluid in loop) have been carried out. The obtained results show that by applying magnetic field and also by taking advantage of temperature dependent property of the magnetic susceptibility, a flow of ferrofluid is created in the loop and by increasing the heat input (heater power) in the loop, the flow rate in the loop is increased. Moreover, the results show that by having a cold source (for rejection of produced heat) with higher constant temperature, the flow rate in the loop increases. Furthermore, the flow rate in the cooling loop is increased as the volume fraction of the nanoparticles in the base fluid increases. The mentioned cooling loop can be used in the electronic cooling systems.