Engineering Nanofluids for Heat Transfer Applications

Nanofluids (NFs) are nanotechnology-based colloidal dispersion prepared by dispersing nanoparticles (NPs) in conventional liquids, as the base liquid. These advanced fluids have displayed potential to enhance the performance of conventional heat transfer fluids. This work aims at providing an insight to the field of NFs by investigating in detail the fabrication and evaluation of physico-chemical, thermo-physical and heat transfer characteristics of NFs for practical heat transfer applications. However, in order to utilize NFs as heat transfer fluids in real applications there are some challenges to overcome. Therefore, our goal is not only to optimize the thermo-physical properties of NFs with the highest thermal conductivity (TC) and minimal impact of NPs on viscosity, but also on preparing NFs with good stability and the best heat transfer performance. In the first stage, detailed studies were carried out to engineer NFs with good stability and optimal thermo-physical properties. In this work we investigated the most important factors, and the dependence of thermo-physical properties of NFs, including NP composition and concentration, NF stability, surface modifiers, particle size (NP size and particle with micron size), NF preparation method (two-step vs one-step method) and base liquid was studied. We also demonstrated, for the first time, the role of crystal structure, exemplified by alpha- and beta- SiC particles, on thermo-physical properties of NFs. For these purposes several NFs were fabricated using different nanostructured materials and various base liquids by one-step and two-step methods. An optimization procedure was designed to keep a suitable control in order to reach the ultimate aim where several stages were involved to check the desired characteristics of each NF system. Among several NFs systems studied in the first stage evaluation, a particular NF system with 9 wt% concentration, engineered by dispersing SiC NPs with alpha- crystal structure in water/ethylene glycol as based liquid exhibited the optimal thermo-physical properties. This NF was the only case which could pass the all criteria involved in the optimization procedure by exhibiting good stability, TC enhancements of ~20% with only 14% increase in viscosity at 20 oC. Therefore, this engineered NF was considered for next phase evaluation, where heat transfer coefficient (HTC) tests were designed and carried out to evaluate the thermal transport property of the selected alpha- SiC NF. A HTC enhancement of 5.5% at equal pumping power, as realistic comparison criteria, was obtained indicating the capability of this kind of NFs to be used in industrial heat transfer applications. These findings are among the few studies in the literature where the heat transfer characteristics of the NFs were noticeable, reproducible and based on a realistic situation with capability of commercializing as effective heat transfer fluid.  QC 20140416Nanohe

Thermal performance of screen mesh heat pipe with Al2O3 nanofluid

This study presents the effect of Al2O3 nanofluid (NF) on thermal performance of screen mesh heat pipe in cooling applications. Three cylindrical copper heat pipes of 200 mm length and 6.35 mm outer diameter containing two layers of screen mesh were fabricated and tested with distilled water and water based Al2O3 NF with mass concentrations of 5% and 10% as working fluids. To study the effect of NF on the heat pipes thermal performance, the heat input is increased and then decreased consecutively and the heat pipes surface temperatures are measured at steady state conditions. Results show that using 5 wt.% of Al2O3 NF improves the thermal performance of the heat pipe for increasing and decreasing heat fluxes compared with distilled water, while utilizing 10 wt.% of Al2O3 NF deteriorates the heat pipe thermal performance. For heat pipe with 5 wt.% Al2O3 NF the reduction in thermal resistance of the heat pipe is found to be between 6% and 24% for increasing and between 20% and 55% for decreasing heat fluxes, while the thermal resistance increased between 187% and 206% for increasing and between 155% and 175% for decreasing steps in heat pipe with 10 wt.% of Al2O3 NF.Qc 20150507</p