30 research outputs found
Discussion on the thermal conductivity enhancement of nanofluids
Increasing interests have been paid to nanofluids because of the intriguing heat transfer enhancement performances presented by this kind of promising heat transfer media. We produced a series of nanofluids and measured their thermal conductivities. In this article, we discussed the measurements and the enhancements of the thermal conductivity of a variety of nanofluids. The base fluids used included those that are most employed heat transfer fluids, such as deionized water (DW), ethylene glycol (EG), glycerol, silicone oil, and the binary mixture of DW and EG. Various nanoparticles (NPs) involving Al2O3 NPs with different sizes, SiC NPs with different shapes, MgO NPs, ZnO NPs, SiO2 NPs, Fe3O4 NPs, TiO2 NPs, diamond NPs, and carbon nanotubes with different pretreatments were used as additives. Our findings demonstrated that the thermal conductivity enhancements of nanofluids could be influenced by multi-faceted factors including the volume fraction of the dispersed NPs, the tested temperature, the thermal conductivity of the base fluid, the size of the dispersed NPs, the pretreatment process, and the additives of the fluids. The thermal transport mechanisms in nanofluids were further discussed, and the promising approaches for optimizing the thermal conductivity of nanofluids have been proposed
Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Heat Transfer Modulation in Micro-Dispersed Channel Flow
The object of this paper is to study the influence of dispersed micrometer
size particles on turbulent heat transfer mechanisms in wall-bounded flows. The
strategic target of the current research is to set up a methodology to size and
design new-concept heat transfer fluids with properties given by those of the
base fluid modulated by the presence of dynamically-interacting,
suitably-chosen, discrete micro- and nano- particles. We run Direct Numerical
Simulation (DNS) for hydrodynamically fully-developed, thermally-developing
turbulent channel flow at shear Reynolds number Re=150 and Prandtl number Pr=3,
and we tracked two large swarms of particles, characterized by different
inertia and thermal inertia. Preliminary results on velocity and temperature
statistics for both phases show that, with respect to single-phase flow, heat
transfer fluxes at the walls increase by roughly 2% when the flow is laden with
the smaller particles, which exhibit a rather persistent stability against
non-homogeneous distribution and near-wall concentration. An opposite trend
(slight heat transfer flux decrease) is observed when the larger particles are
dispersed into the flow. These results are consistent with previous
experimental findings and are discussed in the frame of the current research
activities in the field. Future developments are also outlined.Comment: Pages: 305-32