Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Nanofluid is known as a new generation of fluid and it has been introduced almost several decades ago. But its effectiveness in practical thermal engineering applications has started to diminish with time due to the several factors such as physical instability, complex procedure for production of nanofluids and its cost, instability of suspension of nanoparticles into a base fluid, choice of thermophysical properties and reliability of nanofluids. To overcome these problems, two different phases such as a base fluid (water) and nanoparticles can be considered instead of a typical nanofluid which actually acts like a fluid-solid mixture. However, the interaction between the fluid and particles needs to be investigated to assess its performance. In the present work, Eulerian- Lagrangian discrete phase model has been used with temperature dependent thermophysical properties of the base fluid (water) and nanoparticles to study the thermal performance behaviour of Al2O3 and TiO2 nanoparticles inside a horizontal pipe within the transition to turbulent flow regimes. SST and Realizable models are considered for the modelling of transition and turbulent flow fields respectively with an enhanced near wall treatment. Results reveal that the different phases for water and nanoparticles can be used instead of a nanofluid and no thermophysical properties of nanofluid are needed to explain such behaviour. Also, it is found that the enhancement of heat transfer rate is feasible and such enhancement is fully dependent of the thermal conductivity of nanoparticles as well as nanoparticles size diameters and volume concentrations.