A Comparative Study of Thermal Performance of Different Nanofluids: An Analytic Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine an exact solution for the fluid flow and heat transfer of laminar steady magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) nanofluid flow over a stretching/shrinking surface. Appropriate similarity transformations were used to transform the governing partial differential equations into coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The current study showed good correspondence with previously published work. The solution was deduced from the solution of the flow field and temperature field. Furthermore, the dimensionless skin friction coefficient and Nusselt number were derived. The solution of the temperature field was deduced in terms of the generalized Laguerre polynomial. The value of the generalized Laguerre polynomial was calculated using the “LaguerreL” command in MuPAD. The impact of different physical parameters of the symmetry on the thermal performance, including the nanoparticle volume fraction parameter, magnetic parameter, mass suction/injection parameter and stretching/shrinking parameter, is discussed in detail for different nanoparticles. Furthermore, the effect of nanoparticle type on the fluid velocity component, temperature distribution, skin friction coefficient and Nusselt number was studied in detail. Four different nanoparticles were considered in this study. This work reveals that the nanoparticles within the base fluid have the potential to increase the heat transfer ability of many liquids. The results indicate that silver and titanium oxide nanoparticles had the largest and lowest skin friction coefficients, respectively, in the shrinking surface case, exhibiting opposite behavior in the stretching surface case among all the nanoparticles considered. The results also indicate that silver and titanium oxide nanoparticles had the largest and lowest Nusselt numbers, respectively, for both the stretching and the shrinking surface cases. It is suggested silver nanoparticles are not used for optimum heat transfer.