An investigation on exergy in a wavy wall microchannel heat sink by using various nanoparticles in fluid flow: two-phase numerical study

Abstract

In the present paper, a wavy wall microchannel heatsink (WWMCHS) with wavy walls is simulated using ANSYS FLUENT software. Heat sink (H/S) is made of aluminum and is designed to cool an electronic component. Water, alumina/water and copper oxide/water nanofluids (N/F) are used as cooling fluid in the H/S. The volume percentage of nanoparticles varies from 0 to 2%. A two-phase mixture method is employed to simulate N/F flow. In this paper, the main purpose of exergy analysis includes out exergy, gain exergy and loss exergy along with the analysis of the efficiency of the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The main innovation of the article is the study of exergy on the new geometry of H/S. The SIMPLE algorithm and the volume control method are used for the simulations. Results showed that using the N/F decreases the maximum temperature. By adding 2% alumina and copper oxide to water in Reynolds 500, the maximum temperature is reduced by 2.55 °C and 2.38 °C, respectively. Using N/Fs instead of water, especially $$CuO$$ /water, reduces the loss exergy amount. For alumina oxide, this reduction is 1.84 W for Re = 1500 and 2.61 W for copper oxide.