Enhancement of thermal conductivity using nanofluids | Properties of nanofluids

Conventional fluids such as water, ethylene glycol and Sodium are normally used as heat transfer fluids. Various techniques are applied to enhance the heat transfer. The use of additives is a technique applied to enhance the heat transfer performance of base fluids. Recently as an innovative material, nanometer-sized particle have been used in suspension of conventional heat transfer fluids. In this project we have considered the problem of forced convection flow of fluid inside a uniformly heated tube that is submitted to a constant and uniform heat flux at the wall. The heat transfer rates are analyzed for both the base fluids and the nano fluids under the same Reynolds number and uniform heat flux in the uniform heated pipe and the analytical work is done in FLUENT 6.3 software. In this project the three base fluids are selected namely water, ethylene glycol and Sodium. To enhance the heat transfer rate of the above said base fluids the nano particles of Aluminum, copper, and silver were chosen. And also a comparative work is done between the thermal conductivity models.