HEAT TRANSFER ENHANCEMENT USING NANO FLUID PARTICLE

Abstract

Heat transfer devices have been used for conversion and recovery of heat in many industrial and domestic applications. Over five decades, there has been concerted effort to develop design of heat exchanger that can result in reduction in energy requirement as well as material and other cost saving measures by functioning in most efficient and effective way serving our purpose. Heat transfer enhancement techniques generally reduce the thermal resistance either by increasing the effective heat transfer surface area or by generating turbulence. These techniques are classified as active and passive techniques. The active technique requires external power while the passive technique does not need any external power.

Our project is on enhancing thermal properties using nanofluids. A colloidal mixture of nano-sized particles in a base fluid, called nanofluids, tremendously enhances the heat transfer characteristics of the original fluid, and is ideally suited for practical applications due to its marvelous characteristics.

In our experiment, the nanofluid consists of water and CuO, water and ZnO flowing through counter flow shell and tube heat exchanger. About 50 nm diameter of CuO, ZnO nanoparticles was used in this analysis and found that overall heat transfer coefficient and convective heat transfer coefficient of nanofluids were higher than those that of base fluid at same inlet temperature and mass flow rate.