Assessment of the Influence of Graphene Nanoparticles on Thermal Conductivity of Graphene/Water Nanofluids Using Factorial Design of Experiments

In this study, 23 factorial design of experiment was employed to evaluate the effect of parameters of hot fluid inlet temperature, graphene nanofluid concentration and hot fluid flow rate on thermal conductivity of graphene/water nanofluid. The levels of  hot fluid inlet temperature are kept at 35°C and 85°C, nanofluid concentration is kept at 0.1 and 1.0 volume% (vol.%) and the hot fluid flow rate are kept at 2 lpm and 10 lpm. Experiments were conducted with 16 runs as per MINITAB design software using graphene/water nanofluids in the corrugated plate type heat exchanger.  The nanofluid thermal conductivity was determined using the mixing rule for different nanofluid concentrations ranging from 0.1 to 1.0%. Normal, Pareto, Residual, Main and Interaction effects, Contour Plots were drawn. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) of test results depict that the hot fluid temperature and nanofluid concentration have significant effect on the thermal conductivity of graphene/water nanofluid (response variable)

A case study on analyzing the performance of microplate heat exchanger using nanofluids at different flow rates and temperatures

A microplate heat exchanger is one of the most compact types of heat exchanger used for cooling systems, and not much research was carried out to study the performance of this type of heat exchanger with hybrid nanofluids. In this regard, the performance analysis of the microplate heat exchanger is carried out by estimating the convective heat transfer coefficient in terms of Nusselt number using a hybrid nanofluid. In current research work, Microplate heat exchangers tested using TiO2/ethylene glycol, ZnO/ethylene glycol nanofluids, and a hybrid nanofluid with varied nanoparticle volume fractions. Based on the results, it was found that the thermal conductivity of hybrid nanofluids and the overall heat transfer coefficient by applying hybrid nanofluids show better enhancement than nanofluids. The maximum thermal conductivity ratio between the hybrid nanofluid and the base fluid is 2.10. The maximum Nusselt number of 35.8 was observed for hybrid (TiO2–ZnO/ethylene glycol) at 50 °C and a volume fraction of 4%