Convective Heat Transfer in Water-based Alumina Nanofluids

Abstract

Nanofluids are solutions of a small fraction of suspended nanoparticles in a bulk fluid. Nanofluids have shown great promise as heat transfer fluids over typically used bulk fluids and fluids with micron sized particles. The nanoparticles do not settle in the fluid and do not cause clogging or damage to surfaces that is seen with micron sized particles. In the current work we compare the performance of different mass loadings of water- based alumina nanofluids in commercially available electronics cooling systems to that of pure water. The commercially available systems is a water block used for liquid cooling of a computational processing unit. The size of the nanoparticles in the study is varied from 10 nm to 150 nm. Results show a moderate enhancement in thermal conductivity and convection heat transfer in the laminar flow regime with increasing mass loading of nanoparticles up to 1% by volume.